Inheritance
by Glory-To-Our-August-King
Summary: There are some wounds not even time can heal. Some that just cut too deep. The Angel War came to an end 39 years ago with Third Impact, but for Asuka and Shinji, the war will never end – and their son is just another one of its veterans.
1. Chapter 1: November 28

**Chapter 1: November 28**

The hospital is quiet, taking the confidence from my stride as I near room 222. The metal of the door handle is cool against my sweaty palm, and I wish that my stomach would stop quivering. It's threatening to eat me from the inside. Maybe it was the four cups of coffee before I came here, or something about the soup Marina made, Jesus just _open the door_.

It creaks on the hinges, the only damn sound in the entire building. My boots squeak as my heels scuff against the linoleum, why the hell did I wear these things?

 _Because they make you tall._

The air is chilling. A newspaper shifts and a nylon jacket screeches. Deep, cloudy blue eyes stop my heart – just a moment before it kicks into overdrive, and the boots don't make me feel so tall anymore. I swallow, trying not to think about how terrified I am of this man sitting across the room from me. That's when I realize I've stopped in the doorway. I look away, to the floor, to the T.V. in the upper left corner, wherever, and I close the door. I can still feel his eyes on me – dark with a hidden horror I've heard in screams and quiet sobs as a child.

The room that was just a second ago too cold is pulsing with a warmth that's choking me. I wait for him to say something. His gaze leaves me as he stands, making it to the side of the lone bed with a barely noticeable limp.

My heart swells, and the breath is gone from my lungs. She's hooked up to an IV, screens and monitors humming and beeping over her head. Strands of gray I don't remember streak their way down her faded orange-red hair. My mother was always a pretty woman, hard to miss in a full room, always sure and confident in presence. Not this time though, where the crows feet edging from the corners of her eyes seem deeper and her skin paler. Some part of me wants to rush to her side and touch her, hold her hand or hug her or–

I take a step back. That would mean forgiving her – and I don't know if I can do that.

My father takes her hand in his, a thumb brushing over her knuckles. "He came, Asuka... he's here," my dad whispers, and he sounds... excited? Relieved? I don't know, maybe I'm hearing things. I'm glued to her every movement, the subtle twitch of her left hand and the way her eyelids flutter open, weakly. A soft noise hums from her throat and her eyes punch a hole through my chest when they find me, unfocused and far away. I remember them being so bright and sharp.

"Kazuya..." she croaks and her lips twitch in an almost-smile.

It's too much. My head is spinning and my stomach is twisting in a knot – I think it's going to explode.

"I have to use the bathroom," the words spill out in a rush and the next second I'm out the door, slamming it shut behind me. My shoulders jump, shit, hadn't meant to pull so hard. I can't walk fast enough down the hall towards the restrooms. Can't just stand in the hallway until my nerves stop screaming, have to keep up appearances – might have to puke too.

The door cracks into the tiled wall as I stumble in, and I'm hunched over a sink. My right hand fishes through the pockets of my brown overcoat. _Dammit, dammit, dammit where is it?_ A smooth cylinder brushes my finger tips. I almost rip the pocket yanking it out, muttering a curse as I fiddle with unscrewing the cap. Pills pour into my palm, but my hands are shaking. Some clatter to the floor.

Throwing my head back, I dry swallow three of the tablets, allowing my system to bathe in sweet, sweet benzodiazepines. They wouldn't really start to kick in for another few minutes, but just knowing I've taken them is bringing me down.

I throw the faucet on, splashing scalding water over my face. Hate it when it's cold.

I shouldn't have come. Why did I come?

 _Because you'd be an awful person if you didn't. They're still your parents, even if you haven't talked to them in 8 years. You can stand to show them your face for a few minutes when your mom is hospitalized after a heart attack – it's just a routine visit. "Hey, doing well? Fantastic! What's that? You'll be out of the hospital in no time? Me? Oh, yes, I've been doing great, mother – take care now!" Then I walk out those front doors and we go our separate ways again._

God, what the hell is wrong with me?

It takes a while before I feel up to stepping out into the hallway again. I have to go back into that room and say... something. I thought I'd planned this so well in my head. _It's alright, Kazu – you've taken your pills, you can face your parents for a few measly minutes_.

"You hungry?" a quiet, but gravely voice asks.

Normally, I might have jumped finding my father leaning on the wall beside the bathroom door. I just sort of turn, the world is moving in slow motion a bit, head feels fuzzy. Good, the meds are kicking in. Still, I can make out that hard stare from behind his glasses, the big kind that might be more suitable for a 90 year old man. I catch the shadow of stubble over his jaw and chin too. Dad's never liked keeping facial hair, he must have been staying at the hospital the past few days.

I give a half-shrug. "Not really."

His eyes dart downward, locked onto something. "What's that?"

"Nothing," I say, stuffing the bottle back in my coat.

Those blues come back up to pin me with a level stare and I can't hold it, never could. His hands slide into the pockets of his dull sky blue nylon jacket and he turns around. "Come on, let's get something to eat."

My right hand squeezes into a fist and I want to tell him off. I end up following him after another beat, biting my tongue. _You're here to see your mother in the hospital. Be diplomatic._

The elevator ride down is tense, awkward and mercifully short. As we're walking into the food court, I have to blink several times to make sure I'm not hallucinating. I've gotten taller than my dad. Or it's the boots. My chest is still quivering and I find myself looking for the exits and making mental note of them. It's a weird habit, I can't really control it.

I should be panicking that we're even in public, and at a hospital no less – where there's bound to be a spill of blood _somewhere_. What if my dad has an episode? What the hell am I going to do? I should be terrified. The wonders of modern science are making it all the more manageable, however.

He finds us a spot in the corner of the room, by the windows. I take a seat with my back to the wall, giving myself a clear view of the rest of the room. I lean forward on the table so I don't sway in my chair. Might fall off.

I don't remember him leaving for food, yet he comes back with a tray of beef stew and a side of mashed potatoes. The pungent smell of his orange juice makes my nose twitch. In my head, I know I'm just killing time – stalling to see my mother that much longer. The realization makes my vision fuzz out a little. Has it gotten that bad? Would I really rather risk sitting down with my father, who could explode at the drop of a hat, than just sit in the same damn room as my mother?

Maybe I need more pills.

My father's voice brings that particular line of thought to a screeching halt. "She hasn't woken up for anything the past fourteen hours," he says, spoon swirling his stew. His eyes shoot up to mine and I look out the window. "Not even to eat."

I try not to let it show, but that rips barbed wire through my heart and I don't know why. It wasn't my fault she was here.

"She asks about you, while they've got her all hopped up on medication. Asks where you are."

I sigh, a hand sliding through my black hair. "I didn't come here for a guilt trip."

"She misses you."

 _Looks like you're getting one anyway._

"Tough," I snap, "she made sure I wasn't welcome back home."

My father grimaces. "That's not true. If you–"

"We've already talked about this, dad. I'm not moving back down to Arizona. Transfer department would throw a fit anyway."

"You could at least visit every once in a while, or even call."

"I'm too busy."

"Right..." he sighs, a bit more life leaving his face. His shoulders sag. "Yes, you're right. I'm sorry, you're very occupied with your work as, a... what was it again?"

"Information Management Officer." pretty much a fancy title for someone who deciphers paperwork and figures out where it gets filed.

This is the longest conversation we've had in maybe a year or two. It's mostly emails I pass back and forth with my dad – and those are downright skeletal. It was just another report I had to write, like I was working back at the office. Just a routine communication. But hey, look at this, we're talking! We're almost normal!

"Right. It's been a long time, Kazuya... can't you–"

"Uh-huh, we done?" I say before I can stop myself. I try not to cringe, waiting for the anger to come.

It doesn't. Instead, he puts his spoon down, wipes his mouth with a napkin and folds his arms on the table, staring down at it. "You should talk to her Kazuya. Just..." he lifts his eyes and mine turn to the window. "Just think about it, okay?"

There it is. That tone again – trying its damnedest to hide how scared he is. That's the only reason I flew down here after he called me, which isn't normal for him to do to begin with. I've never heard him like this before, not even after he breaks down during one of his episodes. So I had to come. I had to see mom. If she was going to...

Did I want my scathing words to her 8 years ago to be my last? Wouldn't I want to be there if she passed? As much as I want to hate her, the thought of her going while we're holding this cold-shoulder grudge, well... it frightens me. For a moment, my chest is wound tight and it doesn't feel like my anxiety pills are working so well anymore. I don't _want_ her to die. I've never wanted that.

I definitely don't want "I have to go to the bathroom" to be my last words to her.

My shoulders touch the backrest, and between a tsunami of emotions, the meds, my queasy stomach and a dozen other things I can't even process – a headache starts trying to pound its way out of my skull.

A puff of air escapes my lips. "You're buying lunch, right?"

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** Submitting this thing now so I can't chicken out later. Not too long ago, I mentioned to another author here, Folk Devil, during a discussion that I didn't think Asuka and Shinji having a child was very plausible. Not impossible, just something I found very hard to imagine actually happening. I don't feel either of them would make particularly good parents (If their own parents, or lack thereof, are anything to go by). Since then, I've thought about it quite a bit, and the more I think about it, the more the idea of them being parents actually appeals to me.

This is mostly an excuse to stretch my creative legs – experiment with my writing, particularly learning to rely on similes and metaphors waaaay less. Also challenging myself to write a chapter a week, nothing pre-written, just to get into the practice of finishing something in a timely manner. One day, I'll probably come back and rewrite some of this stuff.

On that note, I've never really written a story from the POV of an OC. Let me know how that's going.

Oh, borrowed ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶ _a lot_ of background stuff from Folk Devil's post-Third Impact story _The Creative Principle_ , 'cause it's my headcanon. If you haven't read it yet, do it up. It's freakin' amazing.


	2. Interlude I

**Interlude I**

I remember being six the first time my dad snapped. The waning sun was setting the clouds ablaze with firelight, and the buzzing cicada bugs were restless.

We lived in Florida at the time, what was left of it at least. In school I learned the rising sea levels had consumed most of the land mass under water, leaving behind a hundred large islands and most of the panhandle. Our home was on the outskirts of Panama City, most of which had been swallowed by the sea. From the beaches I could see the tops of the old skyscrapers jutting out of the water. Most of the buildings along the shoreline had been abandoned long ago and left to rust and decay. Our house sat beyond the loose, sandy dunes overgrown with saw palmettos and waist-high grass.

I race down the street, the heat of the sand burning the bottoms of my feet. My tiny lungs are desperately trying to keep up, but the blood spilling from the long tear down my forearm is making it all the more difficult. I've taken off my shirt to wrap it around the wound and keep it from bleeding so much, or something like that, I was six and it hurt like hell. The chain-link fence, half-buried and lop-sided in the coastal sands, had finally had enough of this boy stepping over it day after day to get to the windy beaches, snagging my arm with one of its barbed edges.

It takes me only ten minutes to reach our house, way past the edge of the suburbs. The plants are overgrown and crawl over eachother for sunlight, the roads made with packed white sand from the beaches. Rogue shells stab at my toes as a two story house steadily grows larger. Looking at it from far away, you'd think no one lived there and that it was just some long forgotten pre-Second Impact relic. Vines cling to its frame, wrapping possessively around every inch of chipped white-painted wood. It's raised up on small stilts, two stories high with steep black-shingled roofs, patches of them missing from the rank and file. It's a house too big for just three people.

I thunder up the worn wooden steps along the side of the house, barreling inside – the door smacks into the drywall. A heavy oak scent spears into my nostrils, mingled with the alluring smell of sizzling red meats lathered in butter and olive oil.

Dad turns from the stove. "Kazuya? What's wrong?" he asks, a hand adjusting his glasses. Then he sees the shirt over my arm, splotched with red. Concern folds his brow and he mutters a curse, kneeling in front of me and taking the shirt away. He drapes it over a knee, one hand clasping my bicep while the other gently takes my forearm to inspect the wound. It's stopped bleeding, mostly.

Crimson smears over the palm of his right hand and he goes stiff. He turns it up and stares down at it, utterly still. I can smell the steaks starting to burn in the pan.

"Dad?" I ask as his jaw tightens from clenched teeth.

The corded muscles of his neck tense and his nostrils flare, eyelids fluttering as his breathing becomes labored. I can feel him trembling as his other hand squeezes my arm so hard I'm sure the bone will break.

"Dad, that hurts!" I yell, but he isn't listening. He can't even hear me as I tug and scream, "let go!"

His gaze snaps up, and there's a wild look in his eyes – wide and scared – that pierces straight through me. There's something else he's looking at. Something only he can see. He releases my arm and I fall backwards, skull thwacking against the rim of the dinner table as I tumble under it. Dad staggers back, holding the hand with my blood on it, and I hope those frenzied eyes don't find me again. I cower under the table as he stumbles over to the sink, throwing the faucet on and scrubbing his hands with jerky motions. Steam starts to rise and I know it has to be burning hot. He just keeps scrubbing, muttering under his breath. The blood's been washed off minutes ago and he's rubbing his palms raw.

"Dammit, dammit, _dammit_ ," he hisses, hands weaving up into his hair and pulling as he starts to pace, water still running. His hip knocks into the table as he marches by, gone around the corner.

A door slams shut – and I run, leaving a few red splotches in my wake. Down the hall and to the right. I scramble under my bed, scuffing my arm across the carpet and leaving a red streak.

Back then, my mother was driving all around the panhandle giving lectures at state colleges and universities, so she'd be gone on weekends and often get home late. Curled up under my bed, I hope and plea this won't be one of those nights.

The time bleeds out for what feels like hours, filled with the running water in the kitchen and the sour, choking smell of burnt meat. I hear her enter through the door I left open. I can't get up from under my bed though, I can't even call for her. All I can do is lie there and shiver.

"Shinji? Kazuya?" my mother calls, exhaustion in her voice. Several heartbeats go by, and she shouts my name. I hear something drop and shatter, and the clicking of her heels echoing down the hall.

Her legs appear, she gasps and falls to her knees, concern etched face peering under my bed. "Kazuya?!"

She reaches for me, half dragging me out as I try to crawl into her arms.

"What happened? Where's your father?" I'll never forget how frightened she sounded. I shake my head and point down the hall.

She squeezes me tight, kisses the top of my head. "Stay here," she says, pulling me from her embrace and standing.

"No, don't leave!" I cry.

She's already out of my room. I follow, at a distance, just in case that strange man wearing my father's skin appears around the corner. The door to my parents room is slightly ajar when I reach it. The tile is cold, sending chills crawling up my legs as I creep up, peering through the crack with a single brown eye. Dad is curled up on the bed with his legs hugged to his chest, shaking – sweat stains darkening his clothes. My mother has his head in her lap, bent over him, long red hair concealing both of their faces. I can hear her whispering softly to him, fingers gliding through his hair.

I hide under the bed again, arm stinging with fire. The blood has at least dried, crusting around the wrist-to-elbow gash.

My mother holds me in my room that night, clutching me like she's got nothing else in the world while rocking us gently. I'm hugging her just as tight. My arm's been dressed, dad's long since been locked away in their room. I can't sleep and we stay like that for a long time.

"It's not him," she whispers to me, repeating it over and over, "it's not him. It's the Eva. It's the _Eva._ "

Whenever dad would slip, whenever that darkness took him – it was always the Eva. They never told me what that was. But I started to hate the Eva.

After a while, I started to hate my dad too.

At first, I felt bad for him. Mom said he was sick, but wouldn't say how or with what. When I ask her why we don't take him to the doctor, she tells me there's no cure. I didn't know what flashbacks were back then. Couldn't possibly fathom how they could turn my dad into a completely different person in an instant. Mom said I couldn't ever tell anyone, or else people would come to take me away and I would never see them again.

There was a big white church down in the suburbs, four miles from home. I'd run there every day after school, though it would always be closed when I arrived. I'd sneak in through the back and kneel at the alter like I'd seen other people do, praying to God so he would fix my dad. A kid at school said if you prayed enough, he could make miracles happen. It was the only way I knew how to help him.

I think the old pastor that owned the church knew about it, but he must have pitied me, assuming I was some sort of homeless street urchin. There was no shortage of those in the south. I never caused trouble for him, so he left me alone. I couldn't go to the regular worships. May parents didn't believe in it and I had to keep my dad's condition a secret.

I just wanted him to get better. Since that night, we always had to worry if something would set him off, bring back the man who came from the crater in Japan with an unknown war in his eyes. Mom started smoking again, even though she said she hated the damn things. She had quit around the time I was born. Always told me, half-joking, that she would disown me if I ever touched one when I got older. Even as a six year old, I knew there was some truth to that. My hot-tempered mother wasn't one to make threats lightly. I'd watch her stand out by the street from my window, a small red glow pinched between her fingers. She tried to keep it from me, but the nostril burning scent wove into her clothes and stained itself in her hair.

Dad barely went outside and when he did, it was usually just to do yard work, never to spend time with his son. More often than not he would lock himself away in his room. To the point where I might not see him for days, sometimes weeks.

"Is dad coming out today?" I would ask.

"No," mother would answer, shaking her head and trying to put on a brave face for me. "Not today sweetheart."

Some nights, I would lie by his door and listen to the clacking of his computer keys. He was always typing something. I'd be in the same spot when mom got home, fast asleep, and she'd cradle me up in her arms and tuck me into bed.

We just went on pretending everything was normal.

Meanwhile, I kept praying.

No one ever answered, my father never got better, and I eventually stopped going to the church four miles down the road.


	3. Chapter 2: November 28 (II)

**Chapter 2: November 28 (II** )

The burger was a bad idea.

I can feel it in my stomach, rolling in on itself and making very questionable gurgles. I pray I'm able to keep it down. All the same, it was free, so it's hard to complain. I'll just have to deal with it. A hand twitches towards the pocket with my anxiety meds – I stop, balling it into a fist instead. _You've taken more than you should've already. You don't need those._

But I really, really do.

That's when I realize I'm stuck at this door again.

Room 222.

I think I'm still having trouble believing I just made it through a whole conversation with my father.

Hell, if I can stand to sit at the same table with that man for more than five minutes, I can talk to my own mother, who I can honestly say I care for far more than the old man anyway. Even if we didn't part with kinder words.

I suck in a deep breath through my nose, filling my lungs with cold, bleach-scented air. The door creaks on its hinges. A golden glow spills in from the window, bathing the entire room in warmth. She's sitting up against the pillows, staring beyond the glass when I step in. She isn't actually in the hospital room with me, but somewhere far away, with glassy eyes and a face unburdened by the weight of a mask.

She looks at me. Light fills her gaze and her expression hardens as the mold returns. My nerves are dancing on edge before I can even think, though I keep from slamming the door shut, seething. I don't know why that manages to get such a rise out of me. What else was I expecting? Certainly not a welcome with open arms. Or maybe I'd slipped and gotten my hopes up when she whispered my name with that almost-smile.

The muscles in my cheek go taut, a sullen look coming to precedence without my consent. I glance to the TV again, a hand swiping over my chin as if to wipe the expression off. She just keeps staring at me. I almost chuff a weak laugh, but a smirk pokes at my cheek and I just barely keep from shaking my head. Of course she wouldn't say anything first. She hasn't changed a goddamn bit.

"Hey, mom." I sigh, hand falling. I glance up, but it's hard to meet her eyes. I might as well be looking at a brick wall, void of anything warm or welcoming.

My hands wiggle their way into the pockets of my overcoat. Somehow it's colder in here than outside. I bounce on my heels, taking in another deep breath and releasing it through my nose. Should I step closer to the bed? No, this is a good distance, comfortable. Sit down? No, that would mean I intend to stay for a while, and I'm not doing that. Just going to throw around some small talk, make sure everything's okay, then leave.

My mother doesn't say anything for a long time, a silence building itself between us – only chipped away at by the EKG and low voices from the T.V., flicked to some news channel. Her eyes fall and she leans back into the pillows, appearing to contemplate the hands resting in her lap.

"You didn't have to fly down here. Doctor says I'll be fine," she says, quiet, yet firm. Her voice is rich, but there's age in it. A weariness that comes with getting older, I guess. Even though she's only 52.

Something snares my shoulders, slipping inbetween my ribs and tugging me down to an anchor at the bottom of the world. "Little late for that," I say, so low my voice comes out scratchy.

She hums, but her lips don't move and for a moment her eyes close, finding the window again when she opens them.

"Talk to your father?"

My right shoulder attempts a shrug. "He bought me a burger."

Her body barely moves as she huffs. _Sounds like him._ She seems to say.

A brown, hard cover book sits in the chair my father was using earlier, the edges worn and frayed. There's no title or any outward markings. Next to my mother's bed is a bouquet of flowers, assorted in yellows and pinks and reds, a few dashes of purple here and there. I think about asking who got them for her, just to get her to say something.

I wish she'd be angry. I wish she'd yell at me – say something she knows'll piss me off and make me snap. I know that battlefield, it's familiar and I've fought it more times than I can count. Against that, my anger is justified. I don't know how to fight _this_. She's really dedicated to the act – so I have to be too. No matter what, I won't be the one that breaks anymore. To my left, on the wall just under the T.V. is a dry-erase board, marked with precise and sharp handwriting.

 _Plan for the Day:_

 _Tests/Procedures_

 _Echocardiogram!_

Next to it there's a little check mark.

"It's so stupid," she says, just barely concealing the hurt beneath, hiding behind a hollow chuckle. "A heart attack..."

My head swivels back to her, even though she still isn't looking at me. In my fantasies, I imagine that I say words that will cut and wound – puncture her so deep she cries and begs for my forgiveness. I dream that, for once, I get to hurt her just as much as she's hurt me. Standing here, watching it actually happen without having to say anything at all – just seeing her slowly crumble while I do nothing but look on in forced apathy.

It makes me feel disgusting.

She's trying so hard to not let me see, but she's fighting a frown and her eyes are glassy. A hand doesn't reach up to try and wipe them clear, my mother is too proud for that. Or maybe she just doesn't care anymore. She sniffs, nose now puffy and red. She's still staring off towards the window, just so she doesn't have to look at me. She's waiting for me to leave, like I always do.

I try to swallow the brick in my throat, fighting a frown of my own. "I... I got bumped up a pay grade – earlier this year."

She sniffs again, wriggling to sit up straighter against the pillows. Her arms fold over her chest, bitterness creeping back into her expression, eyes resolutely turned to the floor. There's a chair in the left corner under the T.V., I drag it over and hunch forward by her bed with my elbows on my knees. A thumb swipes at the corners of my eyes, just to make sure there aren't any tears. She doesn't say anything, but she doesn't have to. Her pale sapphire eyes settle on me, so I continue.

"Uh... Section Chief made me Department Manager. I– I can't really talk about the specifics. CIA stuff, and all that." I force a chuckle. It's hard to talk when an invisible vice is squeezing your windpipe shut. "Basically, I get ten-thousand more dollars a year for twice the workload."

I brace myself. I wait for her to reject me. A part of me wants her to, just so I can keep convincing myself that I hate her. Yet, no matter how much her words pummel me, or how many times I say it to myself, I don't think I'll ever be able to truly hate my mother.

"Came all this way just to tell me that, hm?" she asks after a while, trying and failing to project a light tone.

A crooked smile quirks my lips. "Yeah. Mostly came for the hospital burgers, though."

"You're such a pain," she says, and I think there's an endearment I've longed for there. She relaxes, resting her left hand on the bed with it overturned, fingers open.

Begrudgingly, my hand slides up to join hers. "So are you."

A smirk makes a chink in her armor. She squeezes my hand. "Guess you had to get it from somewhere. Couldn't have taken after your dad and been all quiet."

I grunt, taking my hand away, folding my fingers together. I bite the inside of my cheek when I hear her sigh, the way she used to when I was being difficult as a child. I'm surprised when she doesn't start lecturing me about dad, like she always does, used to at least. Maybe she understands we're both pushing it even talking to one another right now.

"So what'd the doctors say?" I ask, trying to get us as far away from the subject of my father as possible.

"I'll be out sometime tomorrow afternoon. It wasn't as bad as they first suspected. Likely stress induced."

Another forced laugh. "Couldn't _possibly_ be the cigarettes..."

"I quit two years ago, jerk," she says, though I imagine I hear warmth in it. Should I tell her that's not how cigarettes work? No, she's always been a little disgusted with the habit. I think she's trying to joke with me, anyway.

We've never been very good at this part.

She claws for a little more conversation, asking, "How long are you in town?"

"I put in for the next couple of days."

"You should visit your Aunt Misato."

"I'm surprised she isn't here," I say, remembering whenever it used to get bad over at our third home up in Flagstaff, Misato would be there, sitting in the kitchen with my mom and a six pack or two. I haven't been back to Arizona since I stopped talking with my mother – which was when I started working with the CIA. I've talked with Misato a bit here and there online, but it's been just as long since I've seen her. It hits me now just how much I've missed her.

"She was this morning," mom says, "had a shift at the bar this evening."

I hum, the quiet blanketing over us again. I know we haven't really forgiven one another. This isn't really making amends. It won't be for either of us 'till someone mutters 'I'm sorry' – and that is something my mother will never do, no matter how wrong she is or how hurt I am over it. She's always right and I know deep down that it's going to be me that says it. I'm going to convince myself that I'm being mature, that I'm being the bigger person by sucking up my pride, while my mother gets to sit in the right.

That just makes me hate the idea of it even more. But that's just how things have always been between me and my mother, and it'll never change. I'll end up making some sort of personal vow later on. I'll swear that this is the last time I'll ever forgive her. One way or another, I always do.

"Well, I– um... I gotta' go." I stand, returning the chair to the corner. She doesn't protest, but her expression seems to ask me to stay longer. My headache is pulsing, driving huge, cracking fissures into my skull and ripping my brain in half. Didn't think I would need the pain meds. Feels like the tension here is starting to choke me.

I turn halfway, risking a glance up to that face that makes me feel so guilty. "I'll... I'll see you tomorrow."

I step out of the room before she has time to say anything, or am I trying to leave before I realize she won't say what I want to hear? My father is sitting in one of the seats along the wall. I turn as his eyes catch me, trying not to break into a speed-walk as I march down the hall.

I take a bus to my hotel down West Saint Mary's road. A squat, three story building flanked by tall palm trees. My parents live just outside of Phoenix in Tucson and the whole place, like every other habitable settlement left in Arizona, gives off the feeling being stuck in the 1920s. No matter how many modern buildings crop up around the bigger cities, time has it at a stand still. Down the block there's the old Congress Hotel, big tourist attraction. Always packed with vacationers looking for a drink.

The lobby of the cheap, sixty-five dollar a night InnSuites I'm staying at is uncomfortably quiet. The Colombian clerk looks up, mildly interested, before realizing it's a face he's seen before and putting on a polite smile. I shrug my coat off, draping it over an arm as I make my way to the second floor. The air is fresh, but not cold. I jab the key card in and push my shoulder against the heavy door. The only light is from the thin curtains, the smallest sliver left open. Everything else is neat and ordered, untouched. My suitcase stands vigilant by the air vent.

I toss my overcoat on the bed, which creaks as I plop down. Color swirls around my vision, electric fireflies buzzing about. I can't stop seeing my mother's face. That defeated look that finally shattered her mask, spinning up in my head over and over and over.

Getting dizzy. Is it my anxiety or the pills wearing off? Can't be sure. I took more didn't I?

Something punches my stomach from the inside – and starts to rise.

I all but fall into the bathroom, spilling my guts and bits of burger into the toilet bowl. I'm exhausted before I even finish retching, only strength of will keeping me up at this point. The hot, sticky tar of bile burns my mouth and makes escaping the sour, rotting stench impossible.

I sit back against the wall, a hand weaving into my hair.

"What the fuck is wrong with me?"

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** Wasn't able to work on this as much as I wanted. Tougher than the last two.


	4. Interlude II

**Interlude II**

"Your father was in a war a long time ago," my mother says, a cool evening breeze rushing through the trees above us. Our bare feet crunch along the white seashell riddled road as we walk hand-in-hand. I'm eight years old, keeping a sharp eye out for any of the bigger, curling snail shells to add to our collection in the garden at home. Even with the setting sun, it's too humid for anything else but a sleeveless T and shorts. For once, my mother has shed her business attire, settling for a shirt and capris.

"Why?" I ask, looking up at her. She's staring down the jagged path, the wind upsetting her long hair.

"To protect people," she says after a time.

"From who?"

"Creatures we called Angels."

"Like the ones from God?"

She smiles. "No. That's just what we called them."

White from the street scuffs my feet, a big toe smacking into the edge of a curved carapace. I let go of her hand, fingers ripping at the dirt to free the snail shell jutting out of the sand, a crumbling monument to a long dead traveler. Mother bends her knees, helping me clear some of it away before I'm able to tug the artifact free. It's rough and gray on the outside, making wide spirals towards the top where the inside is as smooth as glass.

"Is that why dad acts crazy?" I ask, quieter than I mean to. She doesn't answer and stands. I bang the shell on the ground to jostle the dirt free. The rustling of the leaves whispers over us, a crane crying in the distance, my eyes finding the way back home. He used to walk with us, hawkish eyes finding the biggest shells while I could only ever stumble over them. He never laughed at me for it, tapping the shell on the concrete just right to get all the sand out without breaking it. We found a shell the size of his head once, and he held it up to my ear so I could listen to the crash of the ocean.

"It's not his fault," mother says, a hand finding its way into my hair. "Your father loves you, Kazuya."

It didn't matter how many times she said it. Those words were always the greatest lie to me. If my dad loved me, he would get better. If he loved me, he wouldn't have dragged the war back with him. What my mother never told me was that she had been in a war a long time ago too. I found that out from Aunt Misato much later. In a quiet way, when one too many drinks had loosened her lips.

I had caught on long before that, though. Mother would always worry where I was, fret over every little thing. Normal behavior for any mom most would say. From her, it was heightened somehow. I explored a lot, often without telling anyone where I was going or how long I'd be gone, and like any good adventurer I came home with a proud menagerie of scrapes and bruises. I can't count how many times she yelled at me or grounded me for it. "What were you thinking? Do you have any idea how worried I was? What if it had been more serious?" she would say, sounding furious, but with a scared look her eyes – like my dad.

It was the scars that really made me wonder. Some had faded, while others dipped in shallow fissures, healed over with pale white skin. Most of them you couldn't see when she was dressed, but I'd gotten to know them whenever we went for a swim out in the pool or by the beach. They stretched over her stomach and reached up to her neck in ripping, jagged tears. I remember asking about them once and she made up some story about a car accident when she was younger. I'll probably never know what really caused them.

Then there were the night terrors that lasted for days, sometimes weeks – usually after one of dad's episodes. A shriek would echo across the house, bolting me awake. I'd bury myself under the covers, eyes squeezed shut while I pressed the pillows over my head so I wouldn't have to hear her crying in the living room.

Other times, when she was quieter, my body could still sense it. My legs stung, muscles aching with a restless need to be elsewhere. It would be in the middle of the night, and I'd find her sitting on the couch in the illuminating glow of the television. It was too dark to really see the red around her eyes from rubbing them dry. I'd shuffle over and she'd bring me up between her legs and hold me close until we both fell asleep.

During the day, a collection of pills decorated our kitchen counter, stored in a plastic container with just the right amount for each day of the week. The words on the pill bottles next to it were long and nonsensical, to a kid at least. My father took at least seven a day. It wasn't long before mom started taking pills of her own. She'd scratch at the scars on her arms until they were angry and red, or grab at her left eye and hold her stomach, stifling pained grunts by biting the inside of her cheek.

I knew that, somehow, the Eva had done this to her too.

It was always the Eva.

She tried hard to hide her nightmares from me, working 12 hour days so I wouldn't see just how much they wore her down. Leaving me at home with a father I had to worry might change because of a loud noise or the mere sight of blood. I used to hide in the closet and draw up plans of how I would escape my house if he ever came after me. I was terrified that one day mother would leave for work and never come back. I couldn't stand the thought of being left to face my father alone.

Yet she always returned. It became a bit of a routine: She'd step through the door, set her briefcase down, take off the jacket of her suit and drape it over the backrest of the couch. Then it was a handful of pills and she was off to bed – though not before stopping by my room to kiss me goodnight. If I was still awake, I'd beg her to stay – and she would silently oblige, lying with me until I fell asleep.

"Don't leave me," I'd say. "Promise you won't ever leave me."

She never promised. But she never left, either.


	5. Chapter 3: November 29

**Chapter 3: November 29**

 _An ocean of golden grass ripples around a white house with a black shingled roof. There's a man in the doorway, with a face that echoes the youth of an older and jaded man with haunting blue eyes._

 _"Dad?" I ask, stumbling forward in a body I don't remember being so little. My father smiles and it's warm and full of pride. A giant shadow falls over us and the house bursts in a storm of splinters and dust. They bite and dig into my skin, a hand too big for anything in this world digging into the dirt inches from me. The thing hunches over the ruins of my home, sharp, soulless eyes staring down at me, its mouth stuck in a rictus grin._

 _The giant shadow takes my father in one of its massive hands – joints crunching and muscles groaning as it stands. Those eyes, red eyes, glow brighter with anticipation, saliva spilling free as its teeth part_ _– and it chomps down on him with a wet crunch._

Everything stops with the sound of distant traffic, heavy eyelids trying to open.

There's a bed under me. The field is gone. The shadow is gone. I know, somewhere in the back of my mind, that this is right and real. My brain can't quite seem to convince my heart of that, which is certain it can escape if it beats fast enough.

I imagine that if someone had launched a thousand pound anvil on me from orbit, it would feel a lot like this. The thought almost makes me laugh and I mutter something into my pillow, the light stabbing into my hotel room is just so bright and... there. Too much light. I groan, making an attempt at sitting up. My brain, despite the bolt-gun headache, is trying to run and process about a million different things I'm not awake enough for. Wearing too many clothes. Shoes are still on. Covers on the floor. When and why did I crank the A/C down to 68?

There are proper words for this sort of thing, but I don't have them. What was it mom used to call it? _Einen kater haben_? _Katzenjammer_? Can't remember, it was for hangovers anyway. I don't think I did any drinking last night, but this feels very reminiscent of those rum and tequila driven escapades in dingy apartments or smoke-filled night clubs.

Phone.

I glance to the nightstand, and sure enough it's sitting just where I left it. The digital clock reads 9:54. I struggle to sit at the edge of the bed, rubbing my eyes so everything stops blurring together. Dreams of nourishment and hydration seem all the more real now.

 **Phone**. My brain shouts this time. I don't know why, but I panic. I snatch it from the nightstand and flick it on. There are thirty-one missed calls and half as many text messages. All of them from Marina.

Fuck, I was supposed to call her last night.

"Jesus Christ..." I sigh. Who the hell calls somebody thirty-one times? If I didn't answer the first two times, what makes the other twenty-nine consecutive calls more likely? But that's Marina. I don't read the texts or listen to the seven voice mails. I already know what they say. I stare down at my phone for a while, giving in and dialing her number. No sense in putting it off, she'll just be twice as pissed and try calling me when I really don't want to talk.

The ringer purrs once, then clicks– "Hello?"

I try and smile. "Hey, sweetheart."

"Thanks for answering my calls, asshole."

I sigh before I can think to hold it in, dropping all hopes of us having a normal, loving conversation. "I was asleep."

"So why didn't you call me before you went to bed?"

"I was really tired, and I forgot. I'm sorry."

A pause, resignation in her voice as she says, "No you're not."

"I am. I was just... dealing with a lot yesterday," I say. It isn't like she doesn't know why I'm down here. But I have to be calm, I have to be patient. If I call her out or accuse her of acting childish, well, that'll pretty much guarantee a steady flow of texts about how I'm a lousy boyfriend and that I don't actually care about her for the next two days. She doesn't respond though, just making me sit here, listening to the soft whisper of her breathing on the other end before the tension sends my nerves skyrocketing. "Look, I don't know what you want me to say – I'm sorry you couldn't go more than sixteen hours without a goddamn phone call."

The phone clicks as she hangs up.

She _knows_ that just pisses me off.

A moment later I get a text message that reads: jerk :(

I consider ignoring her, again. I also realize that's just avoiding the inevitable, so I spend the next thirty minutes trading texts with her. She lets the accusations fly, a prosecutor putting me on trial while I scramble to form a defense. I shouldn't even have to be going through this crap with her. Still, I tell her I love her, that I need her. I try to make her understand. She never does, but like always, after I've groveled enough, she accepts my apology in her typical standoffish way. I promise to call her tonight.

This is all just a part of the routine, and we'll wind up doing the same thing again next week.

I shower and dress, business attire left behind for the most part. It's chilly outside, but not enough to warrant the thick, weighty overcoat I arrived in. So I throw on one of my old jackets from home. Olive green military wear, the outside made up of some kind of cotton and nylon blend. Can't really say for sure. The lining is pure cotton though, fuzzy and warm as hell.

Before heading out, I take stock. Mood stabilizers, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety and anti-nightmare pills, the last of which I apparently forgot to take. It's a nice little collection I've got. I _do_ take one of the stabilizers, pocketing the anxiety meds just in case. The bottle feels lighter than I would like.

Aunt Misato probably still lives at the same house out in the Catalina Foothills. Mostly gated communities with big, ritzy homes separated by acres of cacti, shrubs and bushy heads of grass. Sunlight touches the rolling mountains in the distance, still creeping upon the city down in the valley. Patches of white cover the red dirt and layer the rooftops.

I arrive at a house fashioned in the Spanish style typical of south Arizona, though there's a Japanese garden I don't remember being there. I wonder if she's finally feeling homesick.

The woman who answers the door is wearing a black turtleneck, an amber colored drink in her right hand. The sour scent of Whiskey swirls into my nose and gives my stomach flashbacks of being twelve and vomiting on her carpet. The color in her hair has faded, though there isn't a touch of gray in it. She's got it tied back in a loose tail, which hugs her neck and drapes over her left shoulder. Her laugh lines are more pronounced than the memory in my head and the wrinkles around her eyes are deeper. Still, she doesn't look a day over fifty.

"Well, well, Kazuya Langley Soryu," she says. Her neutral expression comes so easily, giving nothing away. She leans against the door frame, ice bouncing in her glass. "You've got a lot of nerve showing your face at my door."

My teeth clench. "It's been a long time."

She folds her arms, one under the other, holding my gaze. I won't break, though.

I see her bite the inside of her cheeks. Something that might be a laugh trembles in my sternum. Dammit, _no_. Keep it together Kazuya. A stifled chuckle coughs at the back of her throat, though she manages to keep a straight face.

I can't take it anymore.

My lips twitch – and I laugh.

She can't keep it in either, smiling wide. "Oh, my Kazu!" she sings, wrapping her arms around me, a kiss smacking my cheek. My face hurts from muscles that have forgotten how to grin.

"You've gotten so tall!" she says, beaming. I don't have the heart to tell her it's the boots. "And what's all this, hm?" she asks, fingers scratching the stubble growing along my chin. "You're such a handsome boy without all this scruff."

"Alright, _mom_."

She clicks her tongue, smacking my chest. "Oh, shut up." she sips her whiskey and saunters back down the hall. I shamble inside, closing the door and sliding out of my boots.

"How's your mama?" she calls from the kitchen. "You went to see her, right?"

"Of course I did," I holler back, shrugging my jacket off and picking one of the two white couches to plop down in. The living room is wide and open, the sun coming in from the windows making the place glow, with a little help from the crackling fireplace. On the mantle piece, set against black velvet, are an array of medals and commendations from her time in the military, namely a Colonel's badge. I think she retired from the Army maybe a decade ago, though I know for sure she was stationed at the Air Force base in Tucson five years before that.

Nearby, there's a picture with a much younger Misato in it. She stands on the left, long hair, aviator sunglasses sitting on her head. Next to her is a much taller man, hair a mess, clothes baggy, sporting a toothy grin. On the far right is a blonde girl with a shy, but guarded sort of look, a smile playing on her lips. None of them could've been older than twenty. I can't help but wonder, as I always have, who the other two people are.

Misato comes back with a few beer bottles pinched in her fingers. I relieve her of one, the others clacking down on the glass coffee table.

She sits next to me, an arm draping over the backrest. "Such a nice boy coming to visit your old Aunt."

I scoff. "Old? Please, I'm sure you're a regular cougar down at the bar."

"Flatterer. Ladies love sweet talkers." she winks and takes a sip of whiskey. "How's your girlfriend?"

"She's fine," I say, thankful I've gotten so good at faking smiles. I pop the cap off the beer bottle and take a long drink. The label has a simple blue moon on the front, _Morimoto_ sitting across the bottom.

"How long are you staying?"

"Next day or so."

She makes a face and pinches my arm. "And you're lodged up at some hotel? You could've stayed here a few days for free."

"I didn't want to impose."

"Bullshit. You didn't seem to mind when you were little and out causin' trouble."

The rest of the conversation goes on much the same and I work my way through a few more beers. We catch one another up on recent events. It feels good to just... talk. I learn that Sakura is finally getting married _–_ off to some British sailor stationed in Hakodate. Which means I won't have to hear Yuki rant about all the scumbags she's always dating. Good news in my book. I also find out that Kodama's son was killed earlier this year when his chopper went down in Bosnia. I didn't really know him beyond a handful of encounters. The Suzahara brothers must be hurting over a lost cousin, though. Especially after losing Hiro to an IED in Turkey two years ago. It puts a bit of a dampener on our reunion, but there's plenty of other light-hearted talk to share about friends and family we haven't seen in ages.

I can't help but feel there's something superficial about it all. I think my Aunt's just stalling a bit for my sake. I know she's glad to see me, just as much as I am to see her. There's just something on her mind, however, and I can see it lurking under the surface. My Aunt doesn't dance around touchy subjects, not elegantly, at least.

That feeling in my gut proves true as her posture changes, the formalities dispensed with. "Kazu, honey, we need to talk."

It reminds me in an instant that this is the woman who served with the old JSSDF and sat up with NERV's top brass during the Angel War before Japan was blown to hell. Even now, she sits like military, legs crossed and back straight. Relaxed, still-fifteen-at-heart-Misato isn't here anymore, replaced by a no-nonsense Army officer. It's always scared me how easily she's able to make that shift.

"What about, Colonel?" I ask.

She fixes me with a calculating stare. "This little grudge match you've got going on."

For a minute, I wonder how much she actually knows about it. Considering how close she is with my parents, probably everything.

"Me and mom made up already." Can't quite manage to pull off that lie. "... Sort of."

A thin eyebrow rises. "Yeah? For how long? Once these two days are up, you're going to fly back to Washington and act like nothing happened, right?"

There's no accusation in her voice, and I think that's the worst part. It's the same resignation I got from Marina earlier this morning. It's much harder to take from Misato though.

"We're better off this way. Me and my dad don't get along and I don't see eye to eye with my mom on much of anything these days... at least we're kind of talking now." even as I say it, I'm not sure whether or not I like the idea, or if I believe it will last. For the past eight years I've held on to that resentment towards her, and maybe to a lesser, more resolute extent, my father. It feels wrong to let go after all of that.

Misato gently twirls her drink, watching the ice spin. "Every family has their little tiffs."

"We're not exactly 'every' family."

She glances up with an impish smirk. "You think I don't remember the scrawny teen who'd show up at my doorstep every other night because he didn't want to stay at his own house? Hell, your dad wasn't much older when I took him in too."

"I'm nothing like him," I snap. Misato doesn't so much as flinch at the outburst, that practiced disinterest coming back again. She looks to a painting across the way, amber touching her lips. The glass is nearly empty. The fire snaps, filling the silence for us.

"I used to hate my dad, too," she says, grimacing at her cup. "He was almost always at work, and when he was home, he and my mother would find something to fight about. Until they finally got divorced when I was thirteen. I spent a long time resenting him for all of it. Then Second Impact happened, and he was gone... I've always regretted never giving us that chance to be closer."

The couch isn't so comfortable anymore. I stand, wandering over to the mantelpiece again, inspecting each of the campaign ribbons and commendations. I hear her joints click as she walks back into the kitchen, footfalls soft on the tile. I glance to find her tugging the top off of a square bottle, tipping the neck into her glass. The liquid flows like molten gold, and she plops another ice cube in.

"It might feel good to cut them out of your life now," she pauses for a long swig, "but when everything is said and done, they're still your parents, and that's something you'll never get away from."

I want to tell her she's wrong. She didn't grow up in that house with my father. I love my Aunt Misato, but she just doesn't understand.

"Who are they?" I ask, nudging a hand at the picture as she meanders back over. A softer, nostalgic smile graces her lips and for a second she actually looks her age.

"That's Ryoji Kaji and Ritsuko Akagi. We all went to Tokyo University together."

Akagi rings a few bells, though I can't remember from where. "Do you keep in contact?" I ask, making my bottle a little lighter.

She shakes her head. "No. Kaji was killed before Third Impact... and Ritsuko never came back."

The beer sloshing down my throat turns to sulfur, a metallic taste worming into my gut and eating me from the inside. All I wanted to do was change the subject. Selfish. Before I can feel much guilt over it, she goes from dower to chipper in a snap and I have trouble telling if it's genuine when she starts talking about her college days. The biggest smiles spread across her face whenever she mentions Kaji, though. How they met in college, and how he was the most infuriating man she'd ever met.

We share a few more drinks and shoot some pool. There's mention of Macedonia on the news and Misato talks about the ops she ran back in Austria and Greece during the Union Wars in Eastern Europe.

After two hours and my sixth beer, I find I'm pushing the limit of how long I can put off leaving. "Well, I think I've got to be heading out. Told mom I'd visit her again today."

"Uh-huh. More likely you got sick of losing," she says, putting up her cue. I huff, grabbing my jacket from the living room and she walks with me down the hall to the front of the house, though I don't notice she's stopped halfway until I open the door. There's a hard look in her eyes, and something that might be uncertainty.

"Hey, be honest with me..." she pauses, nibbling at the inside of her lower lip, "when did you get diagnosed with secondary PTSD?"

I don't ask how she knows. I decide not to take offense to the intrusion in my private life, either. It probably made her feel better just being able to keep an eye on me these past few years.

"When I was twenty-three, I think. That was after a slew of misdiagnosis and at least seven different therapists."

"How long have you been going?"

I shrug. "On and off for five years, but it never really works out. Half of them didn't believe the shit I talked about, anyway. So I stopped going."

Cold spills in from outsides, a light breeze swirling it around my arms and neck. She has more to say, and I'm not sure I want to be around to hear it. I'm ashamed enough at the admittance to therapy. I never thought I was the one that needed it.

Misato steps closer, arms folded over her chest. "I want you to promise me something."

"What?"

"If you can't be bothered to visit your parents unless one of them is dying," she gives me a wink and a wan smirk, just so I don't take the jibe too seriously, "at least call home every once in a while from now on, yeah?"

I sigh, but nod. "Alright... I promise."

She pulls me into a hug. "That's my boy. Don't be a stranger, hm?"

I almost wish I didn't care so much about my Aunt, that way I could make empty promises and never have to deal with my parents again, at least outside of the expected holidays and well wishes. She'll never let me live it down if I don't at least make the attempt. Just the thought of it is riddling me with guilt. I'm on speaking terms with my mother now, so I suppose I've already taken a step in the right direction. As far as forced small talk can be considered 'speaking terms'.

At the bus stop outside, the air is frigid and sunlight splashes over the mountains, but brings no warmth down to dusty Arizona.


	6. Interlude III

**Interlude III**

The whispers rise to shouts, echoing upstairs to my bedroom. Blinking, sleep clinging to my eyelids, I strain to listen. I can't hear them very well through the door and I think they're trying to be quiet. Throwing the covers off, I find them down in the kitchen. Mom is holding something and yelling at dad, it looks like a pill bottle. He's sitting at the table, head clasped in his hands while his fingers dig into his hair.

Then he starts to yell back, stands up, sweeps the plates and a vase off the table – a hundred shards of glass scattering across the floor. His eyes are wide and frenzied, like when he has one of his episodes, except now there's rage in them and the veins in his arms tighten as his hands ball into fists. Their voices are thundering off the walls and ringing in my ears.

My mother doesn't back down and I wonder if dad might finally snap and hit her like I always think he will.

He just keeps shouting that he's going to leave, that he's going to kill himself so she won't have to deal with him anymore. I hear keys jingle as he storms off down the hall, the front door squealing and then whacking shut. My mother isn't far behind. Peering down the hall, I see her throw the door open, standing at the threshold screaming, "Shinji!" just as his car peels off down the road. A growl grinds through her teeth and she slams the door.

I slink back upstairs, grabbing my cellphone and slipping a pair of shoes on, no time for socks. I creep downstairs, passing by the kitchen. Something stops me cold: the sight of my mother at the table, back to me and face in her hands, oddly mimicking my father only minutes ago. The shattered plates lie at her feet, and a blackness forming in my lungs makes me feel just as broken. My body flinches. I imagine that I sit down next to her, hug her, maybe try to make her feel better, I don't know – _something_.

A frown tugs at my face, an unseen barrier keeping me from entering the light of the kitchen. Just the idea of it terrifies me. There's nothing I can do, nothing I'll ever be able to do. All I know is that I don't want to be here – I _can't_ be here, especially not when my dad gets back. I don't want to watch him walk through that door, looking worn and exhausted. A sad, sniveling wreck of person. A lost little _child_. I don't want to watch as mom touches her head to his and they hold each other for a long while. Because she _always_ forgives him, one way or another.

It makes me sick.

He's threatened to kill himself a few times before. As I sneak out the back door, I hope he goes through with it this time. Even as I think it, wish it with all the malice in my heart, I don't know what I'll do if he actually doesn't come home. If he kills himself, if he mans up and just leaves us alone, maybe me and mom can be happy. To me, an eleven year old boy growing up with a father who can't forget, it's as sound a solution as any other.

So why do I dread the thought of him never returning?

I head south down Campbell Avenue at a run, slowing to a jog when I think the house is far enough behind. I haven't packed anything, a little foolish in retrospect, but I just needed to get out of that house, if only for a little while. I needed to get away.

A few porch lights illuminate Aunt Misato's villa, which isn't quite as large and grand as the other luxury homes in Catalina, but definitely more comfortable than the run-down shacks in Panama. I knock on the wooden frame of the double doors, hoping she's still up. Peering through the panes of cloudy glass, I can't make out any lights and, for a moment, feel a little guilty. Maybe I should've called ahead. What if she doesn't hear the knocking? Should I ring the doorbell?

 _Stupid, what are you even doing out here?_

A glow snaps to life in the hall, a blurry figure growing bigger in the world behind the doors. She pauses, likely peering through the little eye hole higher up. She's still rubbing sleep from her eyes when the door creaks open, garbed in baggy pink pants and a yellow top, hair disheveled on one side.

Seeing me, her brain kicks into overdrive – very awake and very concerned. "Hey, what's wrong kiddo?"

"Nothing," I blurt, wincing. "It's just... uh, can I... stay here tonight?"

She blinks, perplexion sitting on her brow. "How come?"

"I just... don't want to be home, right now," I say, trying to sound nonchalant, like this is something every kid asks their Aunt so abruptly in the night.

A few heartbeats go by with the nighttime breeze and Misato steps aside, nodding me in. She doesn't question why I'm dressed like I just hopped out of bed, why I'm wearing shoes without socks, or what I'm doing at her door at midnight. She just smiles and tells me to make myself at home, offers me soda and snacks while I get comfortable on her couch.

She sets me up with pillows and blankets until I've got a cocoon of cotton and silk, stocked with more sugar-blasted treats than I know what to do with. She hops down next to me, wriggling to get comfy as she folds her legs. We stay up well into the night watching whatever happens to be on TV, mostly cartoons and stuff with a guy who has an oil-painted mustache. It didn't really matter what we watched, because I had Misato there laughing next to me. I can forget for a little while that my parents fight. Everything is normal here, everything is warm and right. I'd stay here forever if I could.

The next morning comes all too soon.

At some point, Misato must have texted my parents about where I was. Mom comes to get me, scolding me just for making her worry. Misato talks her down, makes up a few lies, and I'm saved from a month of being grounded. Just like that. As I follow mom out to the car, my Aunt gives me a wink and a little smile.

From then on, I knew I finally had someone on my side. When things got hard at home, I could just stay over at Aunt Misato's. She never asked questions, never tried to pry where it wasn't wanted. If I _did_ want to talk about it, I would, and she'd sit and listen. If not, she didn't push for explanations or throw halfhearted advice at me. We'd stay up until five in the morning watching horror flicks or one of those old black and white comedies depending on her mood. She'd let me take sips from her beers and laugh when I made a face.

She spoiled me rotten and loved every minute of it. Now that I'm older, I think she always secretly wanted a child, but I was as close to the real thing as she was willing, or able, to get. That suited us both just fine. She was my best friend.

Back when I was still just a baby, Japan – as a nation – didn't really exist anymore. It would be a long while before it reached any semblance of a unified people again. So the Japanese that had been moved to the States after Third Impact tried to stick together and keep their disjointed culture alive, save for my parents. They were all too eager to separate themselves from the small patches of community that cropped up all along the East Coast. So one of the few truly Japanese people I knew growing up was Misato. I have a handful of fuzzy too-young-to-remember-anything memories of a woman who always smiled and laughed with me, speaking indistinct words in a soft, motherly tone.

Mom and dad were actually the ones who christened her Aunt Misato for me. She and my father were close when he was younger, so she was practically family. She wasn't state-side a whole lot, usually out on deployment. She'd call when she could and I was always the first one to answer the phone when it rang, just in case it was her.

Every Thursday the mail came and I'd be racing home from the bus stop to check the mailbox for one of her letters. She'd send me envelopes packed with little odds and ends from the places she visited, a few photographs shipped with them. They were always signed: _to my dearest honey_ and punctuated with a small pen-drawn heart at the end.

I still have a picture of her somewhere in full battledress, desert camo kit and a bandana to cover her hair. She's sitting in a dusty, sand-riddled barracks, an M-16 between her legs and a big smile on her face.

Right around the time I was ten, she was discharged and decided to move out to Arizona with us. I was probably pretty lucky to have her around when I did. In middle school I was a bit of a delinquent, to put it lightly. The teachers had my mom's number on speed dial. I was suspended from school at least three times, nearly expelled five, had detention most days out of the week, and received countless scathing reprimands that would put even the nastiest drill sergeant to shame.

It was part of the reason I usually ended up at Misato's. Some days I wouldn't even go home. I'd send mom a text, tell her where I would be that night and pretend I didn't have parents for a while. It was a refuge from that other life at home. Mom couldn't do much to fight it either. Misato wielded this power when it came to her, this impenetrable air of authority, like no one I'd ever seen. It both amazed and terrified me. All the same, it was nice having someone to protect me. Someone who understood me in a way my parents, teachers and handful of rotten friends simply couldn't.

Despite all the bad memories I have of Tucson, I took a lot of good ones from that house in Catalina.

When I was twelve, it was decided in my mind that I was old enough to try more than just the cheap malt beers Misato kept stocked in the fridge. It was that gold stuff that came in oddly shaped bottles. Her favorite was the Canadian Whiskey, Crown Royal I think. At least it was the brand I saw the most of, so to my twelve year old psyche, it must have been _awesome_.

When I asked, she chuckled and handed me her glass. "You won't like it," she warned with a knowing smile.

Proud, arrogant, in the prime of my youth, I scoffed. It was colored rich and vibrant amber – there was no way it could be anything but the softest and sweetest of juices.

I was sick for the rest of the night. She didn't complain or say 'I told you so'. She just took care of me, like she always did. I've had plenty of hard liquor since then, but haven't touched Whiskey once, much to my Aunt's boundless mirth.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** well, not really notes. Just a shout-out to anyone who's been reading – you're _awesome!_


	7. Chapter 4: November 29 (II)

**Chapter 4: November 29 (II)**

It's gotten much harder to see the red scar in the sky. Almost impossible to catch at night depending on where the moon is. There are pictures of it back when it was a huge, gaping wound in the stars. Mom used to tell me she could see it even during the day when she was younger. With so many returnees, it began to shrink until it was but a sliver that could only be seen from Earth certain times of the year.

It awes me, more so now than when I was a kid. I wonder what kind of war could suck up an entire world full of people and turn them into a floating mass of liquid. What must it be like up there? How do people come back from that? The worst part is that I'm sure some of it is common knowledge to most people by now. Second and Third Impacts are apart of the regular school curriculum, covered briefly and in a very broad sense. Still, the events are so heavily ingrained in the post-Third Impact psyche that, no matter how much anyone would like to forget, it's become an irreplaceable part of the culture. To the younger generation, who have been officially dubbed the Partial Generation, there's a strong disconnect from the Impact Generations that many try to patch up through one of the dozens of religions spawned in the aftermath of Third Impact.

I'm sure there are entire sessions in college classes that discuss it in depth. Long lectures on Metaphysics, its development in pre-Second Impact and the studies carried out afterwards. I never went. I didn't want anything to do with the Impacts and the Angel War.

I still don't.

The bus jostles, roaring as we make a wide left turn. My view of the sky is blocked by the buildings along either side of the road. It's too bright out to see the scar anyway and the nights come too early in winter to even catch a glimpse of it.

My right hand is fiddling with the scruff on my chin and I'm all of a sudden very aware of how grungy it makes me look. I regret not shaving before coming to visit mom–

I force my hand down against an armrest. _It's been eight years since you've seen her, what do you care?_

Except that I _do_ care. A lot – and all we did was mumble a few words to one another. That's not fair goddammit.

A flash of red moves in the corner of my eye and a shriek of laughter echoes down the aisle. A child sits in his mother's lap. She whispers and the boy grins, saying something that makes her giggle and hug him tighter.

 _I'm seven or maybe eight. Knuckles drunkenly fight sleep from my eyes as I stagger into the kitchen, throat aching for water. I know I've come out here for something else though, something I can sense without even realizing it._

 _The lights are already on and I watch my mother toss a pair of tablets in her mouth. She downs half a glass of water, gasping for air and slumping forward a bit on the counter. She looks exhausted._

 _"Mom?" I ask, brain not yet awake enough to distinguish between reality and dream._

 _She turns and her expression warms. "Hey, sweetheart. What are you doing up, hm?" she says, coming over to sit down at the kitchen table. Her elbows rest on her knees, hands splayed out to me. I touch them with my much smaller pair._

 _"Are your scars hurting?"_

 _"No," she lies. I take one of her arms, turning it over so I can see the thin, discolored lines. I touch them, tracing the one that starts at her middle finger, dips into her palm and stretches all the way up to her elbow. Smaller ones crisscross over her wrists._

 _"How do I fix them?" I ask._

 _She smiles. "You don't fix scars, honey." she takes me up in her arms and sits me in her lap. A tune starts to hum from her throat, soft and light. It's one I've heard before, though I can't remember the words she used to sing. They were in a language I couldn't understand, or maybe I was just too young to comprehend them._

 _At some point I lean against her chest, not quite awake, but unable to fall asleep. My eyes find another scar that reaches up from under her shirt and claws along her neck. I think about her leaning over the counter and how red her eyes looked._

 _Absently, I touch the pale tear on her collar bone. "Do they make you sad?"_

 _She stops humming and I feel her smirk more than I see it. "Never... 'cause you know what your mama thinks about when she starts to feel sad?" she leans her head a bit to catch my eyes._

 _"What?"_

 _She giggles. "You," she says, nuzzling her nose against mine and making me laugh._

 _"Du bist meine herz und seele."_

The brakes squeal and my vision comes back to focus as we pull into the drop-off. The hospital is towering over us and my gut drops. Disembarking, I spend the next five minutes leaning against the walls next to the entrance's automatic doors, staring down at the pill bottle in my hand. The room upstairs was such an easy thing to face earlier today and at Misato's. The comfort I felt being there is a distant dream now, snatched away and consumed beneath this monolith of reality.

What if he's there? How am I supposed to deal with him this time? A frown comes uninvited and I take my second anxiety pill for the day. The smells of bleach and a few other nose-burning chemicals I can't name flare to prominence as I step inside. It's a short journey up to the third floor.

I'm really starting to hate this door.

The world stops working when I see that blue jacket again. My father is sitting on the side of her bed, back facing me. His eyes come around to pierce me and I don't know why that makes my blood boil. He pushes himself off, leaving the hospital room without a word or another look. My shoulders fall and I release a breath I didn't realize I was holding.

She looks better than yesterday. I'm not sure how to explain it, alive I guess. Even in a hospital bed, hooked up to these machines, she holds herself like royalty. It's... good to see her that way again, even if she's also wearing a disheartened kind of expression. The mother I met yesterday was the shell of a woman I've never seen before, not even in her worst moments. She's got her hair tied back messy, sitting with her back straight and hands in her lap. The right hand sits atop the other, where a simple golden band wraps around her ring finger.

My hands find their way into jacket pockets and I take a few steps closer. "Hey."

She gives me a wan smile. "Hey."

Her voice is stronger today too, rich with that slightly lower pitch women adopt as they get older. Those bright blue eyes glance towards the door to her room and I wonder if she'll try to bring dad up this time. Just because we've traded emails once or twice does _not_ mean I want to talk to him. A sigh puffs free as I pull up the same chair from yesterday. Nicotine greets my nostrils, sparking a thousand different memories, too many for my brain to bother reliving all at once. They're probably not all that fond, yet they fill me with a longing for the home I left behind a long time ago. She may have quit two years ago, but it's going to be a while before she stops smelling like cigarettes.

My nose twitches. "Well, when are they releasing you?"

"Four o'clock."

Either we're getting worse at this communicating thing or she's trying to figure out how best to insert my father into the conversation. Seems like a risky move. We just started sitting in the same room again.

She won't have time to wriggle him in if I keep talking. "Did you hear about Sakura?"

I take a moment to mentally flog myself. Stupid question, of course she has. Mom nods anyway, gives me an odd look though. "Is that..." she reaches over and pinches the cloth on my shoulders. "Yeah, that's your dad's jacket."

 _Dammit._

"Huh?" I look down to the off-color square where her fingers are, a few threads left as a reminder of the old Japanese flag patch that was ripped off – long before I got my hands on it. All that's really left is a silver rank insignia on the left shoulder: a single bar with a star above it. I think it means Lieutenant or something like that. "I thought this was Aunt Misato's?"

Mom shakes her head. "Was, a long time ago. She gave it to your dad before we had you. You used to like to wear it when he was out of town," a smile quirks her lips. "Curl up in bed and fall asleep with it."

"I don't remember that..." the admittance startles me, kicks me in the chest. I sit back, brow scrunched, as I try to summon the memory. It just... isn't there. All I have are the moments he's yelled at us, threatened to kill himself or broken down crying in my mother's arms. There are a few glimmers of light, here and there. Times when I was able to forget the pardoned war criminal and just have a father. They're chipped and frayed though, faded and dim against the dark that eats away at the edges.

I must be looking at her like she's crazy, because her expression falls away to something guarded, gaze fixed on her hands. "He's gotten better," she says, fiddling with her ring. "Less medication. More therapy."

My teeth set on edge and I can't even stand to look at her. The chair creaks as I lean back, taking a deep breath in through my nose and letting it out slowly. There's a nice view of Tucson from the window, flanked all around by small mountains ranges, the city itself such a modest little collection of buildings compared to the sprawling old-world majesty of D.C.

Time stretches, what feels like an hour passing between the second-long reports from the EKG. After a few minutes, I think I'm able to talk without sounding bitter. "Why now? Why not back then?"

Mother scoffs, though it's hollow. "It wasn't that easy, especially for us... even after the trials... it took us a long time to get back on our feet."

"Then I had to come along and muck everything up, huh?"

Despite my tone, that brings out a wide smile. "You were a happy little accident."

She earns herself a grimace, which only makes her grin wider. I was often told, very enthusiastically, that I was never planned to happen. It was her favorite pet name to tease me with, especially in front of company. A demeaning, but endearing sort of praise. "Mommy's happy accident!" she'd sing.

She says it jokingly, even lovingly, but doesn't know how true it rings for me. I know there was a time before the war came into our house. My mother has a closet-full of photo albums to prove it. If not for them, I wouldn't have ever believed it. So I wonder, if I had never been born, would my parents have been better off? I'm sure my father thinks so.

No, I _know_ he does.

"Should've gotten help when he needed it. Would've saved us a lot of trouble."

Mother closes her eyes a moment, shoulders drooping with an unseen weight. "Some things are too hard to talk about. We were just kids, fighting a war we didn't understand. That doesn't just go away, no matter how much we might want it to."

I can't hide my surprise at that. When I was younger, all I had were suspicions. It wasn't until I was about sixteen that I knew for sure my mother took part in the Angel War. She's just never come right out and admitted it.

"Like your scars?" I say, suddenly a kid again. I imagine touching her arm, letting my finger tips graze over the marks as if to heal them, but banish the thought as soon as it arrives. She doesn't deny being in the war or insist it was the car accident like she has in the past. That little boy from the panhandle is gone, there's no point in pretending anymore.

"You never get over something like that," she says in a small voice, staring down at her hands, "you never get over it."

I wonder again, for the first time in years, what really gave her those scars. I wonder if it's anything like what my father has done – if maybe he did this to her. I'm always told it was the Eva, but didn't my father use one once long ago? I don't want to believe that my mother would stay with him after something like that, even if I can't be sure of exactly what 'that' is. I've heard the stories, like anyone else. Enough to have an idea, even if history is rather unclear about what really happened just before Third Impact.

They tell us that NERV, at the behest of an organization called SEELE, orchestrated the event. They tell us the JSSDF was sent in to wipe the place clean. They tell us that the giant machines called Evas fought eachother. Maybe there's more to it, more I don't know. My time with the subject has been brief since I've always done my best to avoid it. I'm curious now, like I was when I joined the CIA.

 _Is my mother_ – _is the world_ – _like this because of you, father?_


	8. Interlude IV

**Interlude IV**

My parents never talked about the Angel War.

It was one of many forbidden topics.

I learned about it mostly from Misato and lessons in school that I barely paid attention to. Getting to know the war that had so thoroughly scarred my parents wasn't high on my list of things to do at thirteen years old. I was trying to figure out exactly who I was, why girls were so strange now, why I didn't really have any friends. All while enduring the war that raged in my house.

I didn't have time to learn about anybody else's war.

"Where are my A-tens?" dad hisses, panicked. He's throwing cupboards open, knocking drawers and their contents to the floor and muttering curses. It's about 3 A.M., I'm very awake now that my father has decided to tear apart the whole house. I sit on the lower steps of the stairs, peeking through the balusters and watching mom chase after him as he runs rampant on his mad search for something called A-tens. The panels under the sink creak open, paper towels and cleaning supplies tumbling out as he ducks inside. Mom places her hands gingerly on his shoulders.

"They're not here, Shinji. You're home." she says, like he's some old, senile man who can't even remember his own name.

He doesn't hear her. "I have to find them. I have to get in the Eva."

A VTOL's engines whine overhead, soaring back home to the Airbase miles away. Dad jumps and takes shelter behind the table, eyes searching beyond the kitchen window. "It's here goddammit. It's fucking here!" he shouts and I think I can see him shaking.

Mom touches him again, trying to anchor him, maybe bring him back from the crater. Her voice is still calm and careful as she says, "There aren't any Angels, Shinji. Come on–"

He smacks her hands away. "Just shut up and help me find them!" he snarls, tearing down the hall and ripping the closet door open, scattering coats, jackets, shoes and boxes across the floor. "They need me to pilot. I have t– _where are they_?!"

Mom keeps her distance now, right hand reaching over her stomach to cling to the opposite arm, just watching my dad slowly go insane. There's nothing she can do – nothing either of us can do.

"You don't have to pilot anymore," she whispers.

He falls to his knees, grabbing his head. "I have to do it! I don't want to but I..." he chokes, folds in on himself, arms squeezing tight around his chest. His shoulders start to shake, a few sobs gasping free. "Please... don't make me. I don't... I don't want to do it again."

Mother pads forward, coming down to her knees and wrapping her arms around him. "I know..." she says, holding his head to her chest. "I know."

Those simple words bring everything crashing down. He sucks in a breath, anguish in every tear-filled convulsion. He cries like a lost child cries, gasping for speech as he does. "Please, I... don't... don't make me... anymore..."

His wails fill the house and there's more pain and suffering in them than I can bear. So I cover my ears, rocking on the bottom steps. I can't block it out with just my hands, no matter how tight I squeeze my eyes shut and pretend I'm somewhere far away. I rush back upstairs, lock my door and hide in the closet. This isn't the first time this has happened. It's like something has crawled into my father's skin and taken possession of him, twisting up his brain and making him crazy.

The first time he woke up shouting about his A-tens I hid in my room and cried. Those tears weren't for him, though. I was crying because I was scared, I'm still scared, and what's worse is that I don't know why. A few tears still manage to roll down my cheeks as I listen to his sobs faintly working their way upstairs. I keep the rest in – I don't cry. I don't even feel sorry for him anymore. I'm beyond the point of pity. It's stopped being sad. It's just another way my father tortures us, makes our lives a daily struggle – makes my mother have nightmares.

The next morning, I'm planted in front of the T.V., still wearing pajamas. It's about ten o'clock, mom is making breakfast in the kitchen. Sausages and eggs, it smells like. The thudding of boots on wood accompany dad down stairs as he dons his cotton-lined jacket, keys jingling in his hand. The nametag stitched into the olive green material reads _Katsuragi_.

He comes to stand by the T.V., bloodshot eyes staring down at me. "Get your shoes on," he says, nodding towards the pair of sneakers next to the couch.

I glance at the kitchen, and then to the keys in his hand. "Why? Where are we going?"

"Just put your shoes on."

I think about saying no. It isn't something done lightly. I've seen his rage before, and there's no telling what might make him snap. So I tug my shoes on and we take a trip down into Tucson proper where my dad, like he always does, points in the direction of Phoenix, hidden behind distant hills.

"I wish you could've seen the towers in Tokyo-three, Kazuya. A hundred buildings three times the size, stretching over the mountains and glowing gold and orange in the sunset."

It's the only thing he says the drive there and back, and one of the few things I've ever heard about Tokyo-3. I love imagining what that must have looked like, a little disappointed I'll never see them in person. I learned only a few months ago that Tokyo-3 had been completely destroyed in the war.

Our little routine carries out as it usually does. He pretends that last night never happened, that it was all just a bad dream. I'm more than willing to entertain that notion.

Whenever my dad would have an episode, he'd take me out to a ma-and-pa bakery down in the city and buy me whatever I wanted. Powder covered jelly-filled donuts, crisp green apples smothered in chocolate and marshmallow and bits of candy. Warm crepes overflowing with raspberry sauce and sprinkled with sugar.

Mom always gave him a look that bled disapproval when we got home, but never said anything. She let me have that small reprieve. Let me pretend that everything was okay for a little while. Because not pretending meant admitting there was something wrong in front of their son, as if that would solidify it more than me witnessing the actual events already had. My mother and father were expert pretenders.

I could see it more than they thought, and I don't mean the screaming about Angels in the middle of the night or the meltdowns that happened in our kitchen. I could see something darker in every word they spoke, every fight, every lie – like little cracks. I could see all the winding, jagged fissures that led to something black and ugly, haunting my dreams at night.

Still, those meager bright spots like the skyscrapers in Tokyo-3 gave me something to cling to. My parents rarely, if ever, shared their childhoods with me. Every once in a blue moon I heard about their time in Boston, though never in much detail. With every question I asked, they would answer with vague, tight-lipped phrases like, "It was hard, but we got by."

Tokyo-3 was mentioned offhandedly, rarely in much detail and almost never nostalgically. Whenever I took the initiative and asked about it, they'd say things like, "It was such a long time ago, I don't remember."

It was just their way of saying, "We don't talk about Tokyo-three."

A rule that only applied when I was curious. So I eventually stopped asking. I just wanted to know them. I wasn't allowed to ask about the Angel War, so I had to claw for the bits and pieces of their life that I could get. The war in particular was always this faceless enigma to me – an ink-black shadow at the edge of thought that happened somewhere far and distant in a time and place I'll never know. It didn't have context, a face and a reality, until I met Toji Suzuhara. Even then I could barely fathom it.

I was much younger, maybe nine years old when I met him and his seven sons for the first time. The oldest was thirteen and the youngest only two, his wife Hikari's stomach swelling with the eighth brother.

Winter frosted the window panes, but inside it was warm and comfortable. Everyone smiled and laughed. I spent hours running in and out of the house with the Suzuhara's, forging a friendship in the oldest three that would later carry me through some of the toughest times of my adult life.

As I understood it, Toji was something like an old war buddy. Dad never said how exactly, all I knew was that they'd met when he was going to school in Tokyo-3. The man had been trying for a long time to move out to Hokkaido – stubborn old pride, mom had said. It was the only livable place left in Japan, at least for a large population. The island nation's people desperately wanted to return home, but the northern island could only fit so many and as a result it was expensive for even the smallest apartment. The waiting list was long and it could take years to get approved. The Suzuhara's had been scrounging up savings down in Louisiana for the past eleven years since applying.

I watched him walk with only a slight lean on his prosthetic leg, in plain view since he was wearing shorts of all things in winter weather. He was a tall, well-built kind of man, hair short and trimmed close. It was graying at the edges a little by the time we met. He'd flash me a wide, unabashed grin whenever he caught me staring at his leg. I immediately took a liking to this man. His wife Hikari, my other Aunt, was the kindest person I'd ever met. She had aged far better than her husband, a faded dash of freckles over her cheeks and nose, while her brown hair was tied up in a loose bun. She always had a smile on her face and never seemed to get impatient with her boys, no matter how much they tugged on her dress or made the younger ones cry.

It was nice being around other people that looked like me. I don't look 100% Japanese, but enough that other kids send me the occasional scowl, call me a camp-rat or throw dirt at me during recess.

Just as pleasing was that they all spoke Japanese, even if they did it strangely. It sounded drawling compared to my parent's sharp and concise tones. What they didn't really speak was English. At least not well. My mother switched between the two easily, and dad wasn't bad at English when he tried. The Suzuhara's, on the other hand, were nigh unintelligible when they spoke it, likely because Toji was very adamant about Japanese being the only language they needed to speak fluently. It was silly, in retrospect, since they were going to learn it at school one way or another, whether it was here or in Hokkaido.

I spent the latter half of the visit with mom and Aunt Hikari, who let me touch her big belly to feel little Akio putting up a fuss. In the kitchen, dad and Toji were sharing a few beers and laughing. My father was relaxing and telling jokes. It was a miracle. I couldn't find it in myself to be very happy for him. Why couldn't he be this way all the time? Why not with us?

While the wives were in the living room, the boys off causing trouble and dad up at the store, I spent several minutes watching Toji out on the back porch, smoking a cigarette. I always wondered why someone with such a big smile would risk staining his teeth forever. Mom said it couldn't be helped, most people they stuck in the refugee camps came out with a pack in their pockets. Stress levels were high and cigarettes were easy enough to get.

It didn't really matter at the time as I worked up the courage to go outside and stand next to him.

"Hey there, little Kazu." he says, summoning that wide grin and shooting me a wink when I scowl at him.

"What happened to your leg?" I ask, pointing at the flush and shiny metal starting above his knee and flowing down in the shape of a normal leg. The shin piece is made up of a pale brown wood, kanji of varying sizes and intensity carved into it. It's hard to read, but I think they're names. I recognize the biggest set as Hachiro, the thirteen year old.

Toji's shoulders tremble with a chuckle and he takes a long drag from his cigarette before saying, "Dad didn't tell you that story, Kazu?"

My dad never tells me anything. I just stare up at Toji, waiting for an answer.

He shrugs. "Nah, guess he wouldn't." the man sits down on the porch step, knocking the spot next to him with a knuckle. I plop down too and for a while, we watch five of his seven sons wrestling down the hill that is my backyard.

"You see, I was in the Angel War with him," Toji says, twisting out his cigarette bud against the concrete. "The aliens could do this thing to the Evas, take control of them while you sat inside. Imagine it like you're in your own head looking out, but your body isn't doing what you want it to do. It moves on its own. All you can do is watch."

He pauses and my brow twists as I try to picture it. At school, they didn't tell us much about the battle machines used in the Angel War. All I know is that there were big mechs made to fight the monsters. No one ever said anything about piloting. What _is_ an Eva? What does it do? How could the aliens control it?

As if to answer my fervent questions, Toji goes on. "I passed out after a while. The Angel made my Eva attack the other ones, your father's too. But your dad wouldn't fight, didn't want to risk hurting his good friend inside. Almost got himself killed... then the Commander took control of it – wasn't your dad piloting anymore. He had to sit there and watch it break my Eva, tear it to pieces. I was told there was a lot of blood. His Eva split mine open, grabbed the entry plug – where they had us pilot – and squeezed," Toji raises his hand and closes it into a fist, "crushed my leg. You're dad was pretty messed up over it. I think that'd mess anyone up."

It was the first real story I ever heard about the Angel War. I don't think Toji realized the lasting impressions it would leave on me, assuming that my parents must've told me all about their war in the Evas. He thought he was just indulging a kid's curiosity about a missing leg.

In the moment, it fills me with questions I'm afraid to ask out loud. How does a machine bleed? How could they rip eachother up like that? Is that what happened to mom? Did my father lose control of his Eva and watch it hurt her? My mind starts to build the pictures for me. I see a giant, red-eyed black machine that is my father's. I see it claw and rip away at huge, thick battleplate, tearing skin and snapping bones. In my nightmares, I would hear mother scream as he does it.

I did my best to distance myself from the war after that. I never wanted to believe my dad could do those things. I thought he fought the Angels to protect people. Isn't that what mom had said ? Or was it just more of her lies?

That night, I don't sleep, staining the sheets with sweat as I tremble under the covers, fearing the day my dad finally loses control and crushes me too.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** Hm, I realize it might be kind of annoying for the actual chapters to be so short compared to the Interludes. I _did_ want chapter 4 to be longer, but it's looking like chapter 5 should compensate well enough for that.


	9. Chapter 5: November 29 (III)

**Chapter 5: November 29 (III)**

The doctor says her blood pressure is too high. Likely the root cause of her heart attack, and a much more potent trigger for cardiac arrest.

"The smoking hasn't helped. You'll have to keep a close eye on it from now on," he says, in that clipped way that is both professional and chiding at the same time. I chalk up an 'I told you so' victory point on the invisible scoreboard only I keep track of. The small win turns hollow once my brain processes the difference between a heart attack and cardiac arrest, the latter of which usually being the one that kills you outright before you can even think of getting to the hospital.

I erase my mark from the board.

Actually, I think I'll get rid of the board.

Mother doesn't put up a fuss as the doctor drolls on, nodding every so often. She tugs on the sleeves of her maroon turtleneck tunic – the worn, war-weary wisp of a woman in the hospital bed has vanished, buried under the adamant and clinical Metaphysics professor.

It chills me how utterly different they are. Even when dad was at his worst or her nightmares kept her up days on end, she was stalwart, proud – strong. The mother I've seen these past few days... I don't know her and I don't want to meet her again.

Some paperwork is signed, new medications prescribed and the doctor says he's scheduled her for a follow up appointment at the clinic down the street in ten days. After that, he scribbles on his clipboard and hurries off down the hall. A nurse directs us towards the patient discharge and soon enough we're waiting in an open lobby bustling with people. A couple wheelchairs creak by, several desk clerks dealing with a handful of agitated family members.

My father has gone off to fetch the car in the parking garage across the street, so we sit by the automatic doors and wait, an empty seat between us.

"You should come home for a while," mother says, jarring me straight. Just the mention makes my heart skip a beat.

My brain, meanwhile, starts working furiously to bullshit an excuse. "I really can't..."

She lifts an eyebrow. "What, you got a hot date?"

"Well, no..."

"Good, then you can come by the house for a bit."

The doors part for my father and she stands. " _Schatzi_ , Kazuya will be coming home with us."

He glances at me, giving a nod before leading us out. The car outside is silver and some kind of Subaru, much older make and model than what's out there today. I'm surprised when mom lets him drive, he must've insisted. Since almost swerving us off the road while having one of his panic attacks years ago, he hasn't really been allowed behind the wheel.

I take the back seat, now thoroughly emasculated in front of my parents. Somehow, not having my own mode of transportation handy feels like a sign of weakness – incompetence. Dad flicks on the radio, but keeps it low. Christmas music fills what would have otherwise been a very uncomfortable quiet, distilling the air with the hundredth rendition of a classic song that's nearly a century old.

The singer's voice is baritone and boisterous, mimicking the old swing style of the 1950s. A happy and upbeat tune, the sort of thing another family is singing along to in their own car, out of pitch and inbetween fits of laughter.

My father keeps hard eyes on the road, mother sits straight and gazes out the window while I slouch in the back between them, waiting for this humiliating nightmare to end.

Even though it's been a while, I know all the roads. They've changed very little, save for maybe a few new layers of tar. As we ascend into the Catalina Foothills, something nameless starts to creep along the tailgate, tugging at the back of my brain. The doors and windows of the car might as well be prison bars – I'm trapped and there's no possible escape short of jumping out. The road becomes long and winding, too long, while the mountains grow larger. Rolling rock slowly closes in, rising so high they cast shadows in the deep crater they've formed.

I know that can't be possible. I know I shouldn't _really_ be considering jumping out of the car. There's no reason for it. I can't stop feeling like the world is about to swallow me whole, no matter how much I tell myself otherwise. Just when I think I might need to empty my prescribed anxiety meds, the brakes scream as we ease into the driveway, a narrow and winding concrete path.

It's been eight years since I've seen this house. Up on the side of a hill laden with skinny, leafless trees, towering cacti and brittle shrubs. A light snow covers the grassy knolls and has turned the roof white.

I know now that it wasn't home I longed for when the smell of nicotine struck me in my mother's hospital room. Even if the panhandle held more pleasant memories for me – it wasn't any better before we moved. What filled me was simple nostalgia, a selfish wanting for rose-tinted days. I escaped this place as soon as I was legally able to – and I was determined to leave it behind forever.

A shiver spills down my back as we stop. My parents push out of the car, cementing this as reality and not another nightmare like I was hoping. The pressure doesn't stop building as I march a few paces behind them. There are six steps leading up to the front porch and each one is a mountain, taking me days to climb. My knees ache, every fiber of my being screams out – _be careful, you're in danger here_ – as the door swings open.

Even the hall's beige wall paint is the same. Photographs decorate each length of drywall, though some are missing. At least one of them was shattered to pieces sometime before I left – by my own hand. It hasn't been put back up.

A low meow echoes into the living room as we enter, breaking the white-noise ringing spell cast over me.

" _Hallo_ , Myshka!" mother cries, suddenly full of delight. She bends her knees and slides a hand over an orange tabby cat's back. The thin feline sidles up next to her, purring as he – she? – rubs his face against a knee.

"When did you get a cat?" I ask, hiding a flinch as dad sets down his keys in the open kitchen.

"About six years ago," she says. "His name is Myshka."

"It's a silly name," dad growls. I can't tell if that's just the way his voice sounds or if he really isn't pleased. He organizes some papers on the counter, shrugging his jacket off to leave only his black long-sleeved shirt to keep the cold at bay.

Mom smiles to herself, glancing up at me. "Your father didn't want me to get him. Said we didn't need a cat."

"I've had a cat for thirty-four years," he grumbles, this time with a ghost of a smirk.

She sticks her tongue out and he huffs, pushing through the back door. She scratches behind Myshka's ears and he leans into her hand appreciatively.

"I've caught them playing together. Mean old dad is just a sucker for redheads, isn't he, Myshka?"

Myshka purrs in apparent agreement.

I slide my jacket – _dad's jacket_ – off and fold it over the backrest of the couch. Mom is whispering sweet nothings to Myshka as I meander towards the porch, barred by tall and wide windows. A garden stretches up the side of the hill at our backyard, a sprawl of trellises and boxed mazes of soil. Branching out from the foot of the porch are growths of shriveled vines that go on for at least fifty feet. My father navigates the paths between them, meeting a man who is busy watering the crops, dressed in khakis and a sleeveless white shirt. He's bald, just a bit younger and wears a big grin as he and my father shake hands.

"Who's that?" I ask.

"Hm?" mom's face scrunches, perplexed as she comes to investigate. "Oh, that's Yoshiya. He took care of the cat while we were gone. A... _friend_ from your dad's therapy group."

"You don't sound too happy about that."

She shrugs, turning away from the windows. "Doesn't matter what I think of him. The sessions help your father and that's what counts."

Yoshiya heads around the side of the house, while dad starts to tend to his garden. I can't imagine there's much to do for the brittle plants in winter, but he's got a pair of shears and plucks at weeds and other imperfections I can't perceive.

On the way to the kitchen table, I stumble as Myshka darts between my legs, squeezing through the slightly ajar back door. He pads into the garden and follows my father about, hiding in the brush and chasing after lizards.

The aroma of dark-roasted Jamaican coffee beans comes to greet me, accompanied by the click of a coffee pot. Mom is fixing up a fresh brew, taking from one of the many jars of ground beans stored in the cabinet. Masking tape marked with sharpie labels each type and where it's imported from. If there's one thing my father and I share – it's a love for coffee. He used to take me down to the fresh market every Sunday by a stall stacked seven feet high with tan jute bags, where an Indian man sold beans by the pound. We'd spend the morning there while he taught me about how they harvest the seeds from the _coffea_ plants and peal the skins so they can be roasted. Sometimes he'd make me close my eyes and sniff handfuls of beans to see if I could guess where they were from. I'd often day dream about growing my own coffee crops with him.

"Cream and sugar?" mom asks, holding an empty black and white mug that says "Hollywood". One of the few remaining relics from an age without Impacts.

I shake my head. "Black."

On her left, hanging over the stove, is a picture of the three of us on the beach back when we lived in Panama. I have to be at least five years old, before the war. My mother has a red and white striped bathing suit, a pair of aviators atop her head. She's looking at me, in the middle of saying something while I'm covered in sand from the half-built castle between my legs. Dad is standing behind us with his hand on her back, the light of the sun casting a glare that hides his face.

When I was young, my mother took family pictures obsessively. We had at least five full-to-bursting photo albums that covered the day I was born 'till I was seven. I'm sure they're still around somewhere, stuffed in a closet or collecting dust up in the attic. When her nightmares became more prevalent and dad's episodes got worse, I recognized what all of the picture taking and false grins were really for.

If she captured enough moments of us smiling, doing something mundane, she could bury all the awful memories she didn't want under an ever growing pile of happier ones. She could pretend that we weren't such a broken family if we appeared normal on the outside.

The high-pitched whine of a small aircraft echoes over the hills, eliciting ripples of anxiety down my skin.

Mother peers past me, and I don't have to wonder at what for long.

The back door creaks, my father standing in the threshold. His shears clatter to the floor and his eyes are ablaze, livid – it runs ice through my veins. Mother stiffens, watching as he shuffles in and sits down at their red armchair, slowly, staring at nothing, working his jaw back and forth. He bends to untie his shoes. The laces stutter in his shaking hands, fingers scratching the leather as he tries to undo them. He can't quite piece it together: how exactly to unravel the knot, and curses under his breath.

My back touches the counter before I realize I've taken several steps back, while my mother sits on her haunches in front of him, touching his knees. I see their lips moving, but the words are so soft I couldn't possibly discern what's being said.

After a while he takes in this big breath of air, in and out through his nose, doing everything he can to avoid my eyes. His hands are still trembling when mom helps him up and walks with him down the hall to their room. Right out of the hospital and here she is taking care of him again. My stomach flips and a sharp pain bites into my palms, where I've nearly broken the skin from squeezing my fingers so tight.

A cold breeze flutters in through the still open back door, which clacks against the outside wall. I pull it close and pick up the shears, unsure of where they belong, and sit them on the bartop by a pair of peppermint candles.

Mother's heels click along the floorboards when she comes back into the living room, fixing her hair some and evading my gaze.

"I thought you said he was getting better."

"Stop it," she sighs, trying to put some bite in her voice. She comes to stand by the coffee pot, a hand touching her forehead, before it slides some renegade hair from her face. "I told you he's–"

"I didn't want to come here," the words rush out before I can stop. My nerves are digging their claws into my muscles and I know the medication isn't working like it's supposed to.

She barks something between a sigh and a laugh, shaking her head. "Yeah, it's just too much asking my own son to come home after I get out of the hospital."

"Don't start that," I snap, voice rising, "I came to see you because I was worried. I didn't plan on turning this into some reunion."

"Then why bother? Because you felt guilty?"

"Of course I did – I haven't seen you in years. But I left so I wouldn't have to deal with his insanity anymore!"

I earn a scathing glare for that and she crosses her arms. "It must have been so hard having two parents that ever gave a damn about you."

"You know what he was like!" I throw a hand towards the hall. "Why the hell would I want to be back in this house?"

"Because we're your family!" she shouts, incredulous. "This is your home!"

"Since when?!" I laugh, shaking my head, eyes wide because I can't believe what I'm hearing. "Dad made us _miserable_! He wasn't a father! When are you going to wake up and realize he's _never_ going to change?!"

A slap rings out, a sharp sting warming my left cheek. I don't even remember her coming so close or raising her hand. Something festering and putrid sits in my lungs and weighs them down, boiling hot. I stop a hand from rising to touch the angry red mark on my face, trying to stand tall and calm despite how hard my heart is hammering.

She steps back, holding her hand at the wrist as the blindfold of rage falls. In a moment, she looks scared and there's that hurt in her eyes too. To my right there's a picture of us smiling on the wall, mocking me.

She sits on the couch, defeated. " _'Why can't you just get over it?'_ they'd say," she croaks, finding her voice. " _'Just put it behind you'_ ," she shakes her head, summoning old reserves of resentment. "Like we could just forget everything if we wished hard enough."

Like that she steals my anger away, bringing clarity to my reeling thoughts. She doesn't say anything more for a while and eventually I sit down next to her. There's no acknowledgment, not from her bright blue eyes that can't look up from the floor – and it kills me. Myshka has found his way inside again, rubbing himself against my mother's legs. She doesn't smile this time, indulging his silent request for scratches.

"You were eight by the time we were able to get him evaluated," she says, bringing the cat up to her lap. "The psychiatrist diagnosed him as bipolar, prescribed medication and called it a day. It was bullshit and I knew it – he didn't have any of the symptoms. I told them so, but if he ever got worse, they'd just double the dosage. During one of his visits to the unit, I was arranging to get him assigned to another specialist, but while they had him all doped up, the physician we already had made him sign an AMA release form. Then they tell me since he signed it, he can't be reevaluated until he admits himself under the same physician's care."

I'm hanging onto every word, latched to the bitterness I hear in her voice. The same kind of frustration I'm all too acquainted with.

"It was the same crap with every other doctor we tried to go to. If you complained they'd scream 'if you don't like it, leave!'... even when he was diagnosed with PTSD, we had to fight for years just to get the VA to cover him. They didn't count him as a veteran since he never signed any enlistment papers with NERV. There was a group here in Arizona that helped us out though, vouched for him. A bunch of ex-JSSDF, First Airborne Brigade."

 _Special Operations Group_. I think, recognizing the name from back when I still had top-secret security clearance. Ranger-qualified Japanese troops trained by Delta Force way back in 2003 after Old Tokyo was nuked. I recall the bald gentleman Yoshiya and how genuine his grin was. I try to imagine him as a soldier garbed in black with an assault rifle in hand. I imagine he and a brigade armed to the teeth storm into NERV to combat giant machines called Evas. I can't quite see it, only ever hearing the battle mentioned in fifth grade with any level of detail. Officially, it's referred to as the Siege of Tokyo-3, unofficially, most people know it as the New Year's Eve Massacre. I've heard all the associated horror stories. They must be true for him to earn such long-standing and unfiltered disdain from my mother.

"Everything seemed to be going okay," she goes on. Myshka has settled in her lap, quickly falling asleep under her nimble fingers. "Then your dad... he had a really bad one five years ago and... god, he took so many pills. He was admitted to Saint Luke's and had to stay there for four months. I wasn't even allowed to see him for the first two weeks he was on suicide watch. Even after, visiting hours were only on the weekends. He's going regularly now for check ups."

"I didn't know." it's a weak excuse and not the apology she deserves. My cheek still stings a little.

"It's taken a long time, but he has – he _is_ getting better. We both are."

I don't want to believe her, at least about my father. The idea that, after all these years, he might finally be able to operate under some normalcy makes me feel... cheated. Like his recovery invalidates everything we had to go through before.

"Do you still have nightmares?" I ask.

Instead of answering, she moves Myshka and gets up to stick her cold mug of coffee in the microwave. I hold back a grimace and join her in the kitchen, where she pours me a cup of scalding caffeine.

She casts a glance my way, flashing a forced smirk. "Are you and that Marina girl still together?"

"Yes, why?" I ask, sliding into a chair. Misato must have been keeping her up to date. Still, the shift in mood and subject is jarring, unsettling. I'm surprised that our fight didn't escalate to me being kicked out again. She must really want me to stay. It just brings my guilt barreling down tenfold, and I'm more than willing to forget we ever fought today if she is.

"Just _asking_ – getting married?" metal clinks against ceramic as she mixes her coffee and I don't like her coy tone at all.

My eyebrows twitch with a glower. "Not anytime soon, no."

"So grouchy," she pouts, setting my mug down and sitting across from me. Both hands wrap around her cup and she takes a sip. "The whole ceremony is overrated anyway. Why waste the money when you can just sign some papers and be done with it?"

"So what about your ring?" I chuckle, gesturing.

Her tongue clicks. "I told your dad I didn't need one. Sentimental fool bought us a pair anyway," she says, but I can see the glint in her eyes. She'll never admit she loves having the ring. They've been married for thirty-four years, couldn't say where or when or how. It hits home that I don't know much of anything about my parents at all. They're complete strangers to me. Who were they before they had me? What did they do before they met? How did they meet? All I have is a handful of moments, glimpses into a larger life marred with black memories that aren't talked about.

I look at the pictures that surround us. If not for them, I wouldn't believe my parents were ever those people from before – people that were able to smile and laugh.

We talk for a while longer, doing our best to forget the fight and tip toe around other subjects. Dad is growing watermelons outside and tries to keep track of the flight schedules from the Airbase so he isn't caught off guard when they pass over. He can't predict all of them. Just a year ago he also made a trip up to Chicago-2 to visit the Aida's. Mom couldn't take part, still busy with her work at the lab in Mesa. She complains a bit about her staff, but it's just good to hear she's finally decided to delegate some of the work.

The sun has set and it's only seven o'clock. I make up some excuse about having to catch the bus back to my hotel soon. She doesn't offer me a room to stay in for the night, knowing what my answer will be.

Fingers playing around her mug, she asks, "Will you stay for dinner?"

I pause at the sink, setting my empty coffee cup on the adjacent counter. "Some other time," I say, moving to take my jacket from the couch. "My flight leaves at nine tomorrow."

Her lips purse. "We'll give you a ride to the airport, then."

Her tone makes it sound like a suggestion, as if she's asking permission this time. I don't object. A short walk down the hall, we pause at the threshold as I step outside. Now that I'm about to leave, there's suddenly so much more I want to say. I couldn't wait to get out of here earlier, and now I don't know if I want to go.

"Be safe," mom says.

"I will."

The door hesitates for a moment before closing and my feet are stuck to the spot, the words I didn't know I wanted to hear lost behind it. I've left them here for eight years. I ran as far and as fast as I could at the first opportunity and never looked back. I used to be proud of that. I'd made the great escape, against all odds. I'd broken out of that prison and made a life for myself in the north.

When I take a step back and really look, I haven't done much of anything since then, have I?

At the hotel, I call Marina. She fills our conversation with all of the trivialities of her past couple of days, updates me on all the latest drama between her friends. I spend an hour feigning interest, until I manage to convince her I need to sleep. What Jessica said behind Amber's back is the farthest thing from my mind after today.

"I love you," she says and I hope my response doesn't sound hollow.

"I love you, too."

I hang up, set my phone down on the nightstand. The AC clicks on, pooling cold air down to the floor and around my feet, still set to 68 like I left it this morning. I think to turn it up, but my legs can't seem to move. Even the notion of getting up is too exhausting to entertain.

I'll be going back to D.C. tomorrow. The thought of it doesn't sit quite right in my mind, reliving my father trying to untie his shoes and my mother desperately grasping for something normal.

 _Home_.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:**

Not the greatest, but not terrible considering it was written in two days.

 _Schatzi_ : from the German word _Schatz_ , which translates to 'treasure', usually a term of endearment used in the same way we say 'darling' or 'sweetheart'. Adding the 'i' at the end turns it into more of a pet name and is meant to show affection.

 _Myshka_ : Russian for 'little mouse'.


	10. Interlude V

**Interlude V**

A nuclear bomb from the Third World War, sudden climate change and encroaching sea levels made most of the American West Coast uninhabitable, and very low on peoples _'places I'd like to live'_ lists.

There were a few small hamlets wringing out a meager existence for themselves, staying far from the irradiated shores of San Francisco, and certainly sticking to the east below the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Most of the Californian coast had been swept up greedily by the sea, the waters reclaiming what was rightfully theirs after the Fault Line gave in 2028, the 9.0 magnitude quakes starting in Mexico and traveling north. The aftershocks lasted for weeks and the fires, carried far and wide by the dry winds blowing inland, thoroughly cleansed the coast of anything that managed to survive the Impacts. Even four decades after the Third, half-sunken cities continue their slow collapse, many more once bustling hubs of a rich and prosperous civilization left to decay. A crippled populous moved north to one of the few safe havens left in California – Sacramento, which has doubled in size since.

For the much younger, and arguably stupider, generation it had turned into a kind of coming of age ritual to journey down crumbling roads into the areas where the toxicity had abated, high on opiates as they explore the ruins of a dead world.

In the wake of The Collapse, Arizona fell back into a lawless frontier, vying for control against rabid, zealous refugees and outlaws that had nowhere else to go, yet refused to stay in their shattered corner of the world.

In the two years after the Bloody Sunday of 2033 that ended rioting in Phoenix, we arrived in Flagstaff by way of the beat up Honda I'd sat in the back of since I was two. A twenty-six hour drive through five states – an added hour for each border crossed, made longer still as our sojourn took us through a Texas gripped by martial law. We stopped at a gas station in Amarillo, where I watched a Bible Burning in front of an old church across the way, riot police keeping outraged onlookers at bay. A precursor look at life in the West.

I'd heard of them, but never actually seen one. An angry response from a disillusioned following. The old Christian God had sat by and done nothing as man-made gods brought an end to the world. Or so the story went, depending on who you asked. Our family had been forced to flee Florida because of the New Trinity religions. A handful of the orthodox branches had managed to track us down, trying to get my parents to endorse their particular brand of crazy. I didn't understand it until my college roommate, belonging to the Thodorisian Unification Church, gave me a very brief and very belittling run down.

My parents were Chosen. They'd lived in Tokyo-3, what many of the orthodoxy considered holy ground now. These people were sought after, regarded as saints and prophets. Or something like that.

Flagstaff was situated on a mountain, smack dab in the middle of a sprawl of forests encompassing Coconino County. A good place to get lost. In the front hall of my parent's Catalina residence, there's a photo of me and dad in that old home outside of town, covered in mud as our dog Frau set about digging up the yard just after the rains. In it, I'm helping her dig out one of the holes, my dad somehow caught up in the mess, but happy to help nonetheless.

We looked happy. Like a real family.

In later pictures, my father is in almost none of them, yet I still smiled big for the camera. Anyone but me wouldn't be able to tell that it was fake. I got good at pretending I was happy. I learned from the best, afterall. The dog from the picture, a Boxer pup named Frau, disappeared from the family albums around the same time. It's funny the good memories you forget when all you carry are the bad ones.

It was September and we had just moved to Arizona, ripping me away from the little network of friends I'd managed to build. As some sort of weird apology, my father took me to one of the local animal shelters so I could pick a dog to bring home. I already hated living in Flagstaff, away from the warm beaches, and stuck in this miserable forest trapped between mountains. I didn't want to go out looking for a dog. I didn't learn how to stand up to my parents until I was sixteen, and never had the courage to until I was nineteen.

So off we went.

At the front office, a frumpy middle-aged woman with a mole stricken cheek, mouth smacking with a piece of gum, nods us towards the back. Dad leads the way, until a skin and bones kennel master ushers us in with all the zeal of an undertaker, a wide ring of keys jingling at his belt. He introduces us to a narrow hall with a high pointed ceiling. Chainlink cells ring, barking wails bouncing off the cinder block walls and howling down to us. A ceiling fan creaks as it swings lazily overhead, making the light from the high window slits blink as the blades cut through it.

Dad has to touch a hand to my back to convince me forward. I want to leave, it feels wrong here. He doesn't care. It doesn't matter that this is something his son didn't want to begin with, he has to do something to assuage his guilt.

The mutts are pressed up against their cages, yapping, whimpering. The further in we move, the more trapped I am. A German Shepherd smacks into the fence on my right and, startled, I tumble in front of another pen. There's a dog within who isn't in a mad frenzy for affection or even cursory acknowledgment to feed their insecurity. It's worse than that, something more terrible than a love-starved pup. Her copper eyes are afflicted with something I've already seen, even if it doesn't have a name for me. A soggy corner of the cinder block wall has been made her home, no more worry given for warmth or comfort.

Nothing left to do but die.

Fingers snagging into the links, I scan the plastic protected sheet with her adoption information.

I touch a word I've never seen before. "What's that mean?"

Dad's hand is there under my arm to help me up. He squints, shifting his glasses. "It means they're going to put her down soon. They don't have enough space in the kennels and no one's adopted her."

"What's wrong with her? How come no one wants her?"

I hear the cartilage in his knees as he squats, peering into the cage with me. "She's older than most... and she's been to war," he answers, struggling for further explanation. There's nothing else he needs to say. I'm still fairly young, but to me, _war_ is a black word, something whispered while glancing over your shoulder for fear of being caught even uttering it.

 _War_ means tears and wide-eyed terror.

 _War_ means you're broken and no one can ever fix you.

"Is she ever going to get better?" I ask, gripping the cage tight.

"She's a survivor," dad says, flashing me a rare smile. He stands, a hand motioning the kennel master over. He already knows which one I want. The jailer shoos me away as he slams a key into the lock.

My father's calloused hand touches the back of my neck. "And now she's got you."

The boxer girl perks up, perhaps wondering what more there is to endure before she is allowed to rest. She stands as the kennel master hooks a leash to her collar, her little nub of a tail wiggling.

As she's escorted out, she sniffs, fervent, her nose just isn't big enough to get every little scent and she isn't satisfied until she's staring me right in the face. Then a lick, straight over my lips – and another, my cheek, her big flat pink tongue is determined to cover my face in saliva. I duck my head, laughing, but the tide keeps coming and she settles for licking my hair.

Papers are signed, checks written and then we're on our way back home, with a passenger that is not content to bark at just _one_ passerby.

"Absolutely not." mother says as we walk through the door, swiping the smile from my face. I see the fire that flares in her eyes, a passivity born of practiced control holding her expression as she turns back to the sink.

"Why?" I ask, glancing at my father, who faces the closet, frozen halfway to putting up his jacket. The water continues to rush and I'm not even graced with a look, the sleeves of mother's white blouse rolled up as she tends to the dishes.

"She's really nice, and dad said–"

"Enough." the edge in her voice cuts the line of protest in my throat, a dryness shriveling anything else to dust. The Boxer sits, panting, and I run my hands through her short brass toned fur. Only an idiot keeps fighting when they know they've been beaten – and only those in denial try to fight when the battle is lost before it even begins.

"We've already signed the papers," dad says, striding down the hall and setting said documents on the kitchen table.

The sink knobs creak and the faucet ceases flowing, hands seeking a washcloth. Still she doesn't look at me. "Papers can be voided. Take it back."

"I let Kazuya pick a dog to bring home. She stays."

There's something in his tone that pulls her attention, keeps it locked for a moment as she studies him – a predator sizing up a meal. Then they find me from across the room and I flinch, eyes I've seen warm and kind now frigid. I am not being regarded as a son who has tread on ice far too thin between parents without knowing, but more a peasant in the presence of royalty. It's callous, looking down at me from on high.

"Do whatever you want, then," she says, casting my father a parting glare before taking her leave.

"Welcome home," I mutter to Frau, who brings my smile back with a lick.

Mother never quite let it go, often making some quip – especially if my father was in the room – about how she might go down to the pound and buy a dozen cats just because she felt like it.

Meanwhile, Frau would be busy trying to catch her own nub.

What her original name was, I'll never know and for the first week we had her I couldn't decide on one that I liked. For a while we just called her "Girl". Despite the severe animosity she held towards the pup, Mom thought it was funny to call her Frau, and the name sort of stuck. Frau was as un-lady like as could be, in particular, towards the only other female in the house. At first I was the only one allowed to pet her, a snippy anxiety warning anyone else they best watch their fingers. Father eventually earned her trust, while mother had to worry her hand might become another chew toy if she ever risked it.

If me and Frau were playing, there was no time for anything else. If mom was trying to get me to do chores or even made to touch me as she passed, the Boxer would snarl and snip. One day, my mother had enough. She got between me and Frau, who barred her teeth and growled.

"There's only room for one bitch in this house," mom said, leaning so close their noses nearly touched.

Frau jumped up, dragging her big, sloppy wet tongue full across mom's face. She howled in disgust and I laughed, while Frau pranced away. If I didn't know any better, I would've thought she was smiling.

They were on better terms after that. Mom still very loudly proclaimed her dislike for the _Inz_ _ü_ _chtig k_ _ö_ _ter_.

As much as she was my friend, Frau was a bit like a second mother. In the Fall, getting home from school became a hassle, as I was made to endure a Frau-enforced checkpoint. She'd be lying on the porch, keeping a vigilant watch for me down the street. I had to stop at the driveway and wait, or else Frau would start barking and drive herself into a panic. She'd patrol the edges of the house, nose low to the ground. Once her rounds were complete, the building cleared, I was allowed inside.

My bed was her favorite spot to sleep. Often I'd wake up in the morning pressed against the wall because Frau had taken over the rest of the mattress. Along with this ability to move me without waking me at all, she possessed an amazing talent for manipulation. On the weeks where dad disappeared from the world and his family, a boxer dog could be found sitting in front of his door, making high-pitched whimpers that died into displeased grunts. Father couldn't ignore her for very long and he was rewarded with many licks, a noble prize.

We spent two years in Flagstaff before better job opportunities prompted a move to the south. My parents bought a home in Catalina, reasonably sized and well furnished. Me and Frau experienced the dangers of cacti and sand snakes first hand for the next year. She made things bearable for a while, chasing away the loud, shivering panics of my father's episodes with her warmth.

It was Fall again when I came home and Frau wasn't at her usual post on the front porch. Instead, she had elected to take a nap on the back patio. Except she'd been baking in the sun for the past few hours, the smell of rot and evacuated bowels beginning to fester. Mom and dad were at work and they would be for another few hours. She was lying on her side, a few flies flitting around her face. At times I used to think of how sad I would feel if she died, but I didn't feel anything at that moment. Something happened to me, flipped a switch inside my brain, shutdown all non-necessary functions.

I spent a while just staring at her, until my mind decided there was only one thing to do with a dead body. I didn't cry as I dragged her out into the yard, or as I yanked a shovel out of the shed. I started to dig in the tough desert soil, blunting the sheet steel against rocks and bulbous roots.

Boots crunched behind me, the sun a bit lower since I started, blisters bubbling on my fingers from the rough and untreated wood. I'd only managed a couple of feet, far too shallow for a burial. Without a word, my father took the shovel from my small hands, digging six feet deep and just wide enough to fit the old war dog. Frau's eyes were closed, her tongue hanging out and touching the sand. Grunting, dad hefted her in his arms and settled her in, careful not to jostle her neck. A hand grazed over her short-hair coat, whispered words lost in the dirt hole where he stayed for a time.

Looking back on it, I think losing Frau hurt my father as much as it hurt me. We both lost a friend that day. Someone who could understand our pain without words. Comfort us without needing anything in return. Its simplicity was a way out. A way to turn a blind eye to harsh reality.

I stood in the scathing sun and watched my father bury my only escape, smother it under a suffocating pile of dirt.

She still rests somewhere in his garden, fast asleep in a bed of yellow roses.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:**

 _Inz_ _ü_ _chtig k_ _ö_ _ter_ : Inbred cur.


	11. Chapter 6: November 30

**Chapter 6: November 30**

My mother offers to let me ride shotgun, making this second trip thrice as embarrassing. She knows me too well. Little more than a carry on, in the form of a worn duffel bag, accompanies me. The road keeps my attention while I try not to think about my dad in the seat beside me. No one talks – he doesn't even have the radio on this time. I fight to keep from reaching up to press the power button.

The morning traffic passes in a blur and we find parking for Tucson International Airport. It's a humble two story series of gateways that can host twenty planes at the most.

"Hey, Shinji!"

We turn as one, down the drop-off is the same man I spied gardening with a sleeveless shirt in winter weather yesterday. My brain grasps for a name, _what was it?_

"Yoshiya," dad says, grasping his outstretched hand, warmth rising to the surface. A tight lipped smile is shared between the ex-JSSDF and my mother, then he spots me and his eyes light up.

"Well, if it isn't the infamous Kazuya." Yoshiya holds out his hand again. I'm not ready for his finger-crushing grip and that makes him grin wider. "Good to finally meet you."

 _Infamous?_ I throw father a glance, but my parents have already moved down the luggage drop off, where a pigtailed girl leans over a row of padded seats. The two boys she's harassing, in that unabashed and yet innocent way only children can manage, run off as my parents arrive. Her black hair whirls as she turns, shouting an exclamation that goes unheard as she jumps forward to hug his legs. He smiles, mouth moving but words lost in the hustle and bustle of the airport crowds.

"Oh, that's my little girl," Yoshiya says, following my gaze. "I've got to fly upstate and mama's at work, so your dad agreed to watch her for us the other day. I know it's a burden, your mom fresh out of the hospital and all, but he insisted."

"Ah, right..."

"Not much of a talker, are you?"

"Uh–"

"That's alright," he laughs, a hand clasping my shoulder. "Your dad doesn't talk much either. Writes a lot. I think he needs someone to talk to, though. We get him to open up sometimes. You can't push something like that, not in therapy. You gotta' let them work up to it, you know?"

I don't know, but I nod anyway. Pigtails bounce towards us, followed patiently by my parents.

"Hey, are you Kazuya?" the half-Japanese girl asks. I say _half_ because her skin has an unusual copper tone and her jaw isn't quite so round. Brazlilian maybe? It sounds terrible, but I've never been very good at telling the differences between South American ethnicities. The girl can't be older than nine, curiosity widening her amber eyes.

"Uh, yes?"

"I'm Nina!" she jabs a thumb at herself. In an instant she grows serious, skeptical even. "Hey, Grandpa Shinji says you work at the CIA – does that mean you're a secret agent?"

"Grandpa?" I glance up to dad, who only looks mildly displeased. I'm also trying to keep from screaming because my father has disclosed my workplace to a child, who is now yelling about it very loudly.

Mother can't hide a smirk, sidling up to him while a hand pats his chest. "He's always been an old man at heart."

"Are you?!" Nina demands.

I refrain from glaring at her. "Sorry, kiddo, that's classified."

"Pleeease? I won't tell nobody – promise!"

Yoshiya chuckles, messing with one of her tails so she spins around. "Here, love," he puts a ten dollar bill and his phone in her hand. "Go with Kazuya to the food court and get whatever you like. Daddy has to talk to Grandpa Shinji for a minute."

Thankfully, Nina protests before I do. "I can wait!" she cries with undisguised betrayal.

Yoshiya just shakes his head and nods her off. "You haven't eaten breakfast yet, go on."

I look to mom for help, or an explanation – _anything_. I don't want to be alone with this kid. "We'll be along in a bit." she says, the trio walking further down the terminal.

Nina's fingers tighten around the bill and I bounce on my heels. "Uh, guess you better follow me then, huh?"

The place is bustling, barely awake commuters shuffling in line for coffee or some poorly prepared and overpriced breakfast sandwich. I've elected to take the cafe's watered down coffee, for a rare moment splashing creamer and sugar into the mix just to make it taste like something. Nina sits across from me, kicking her legs and content to munch on her morning bagel, while also playing some flashy game on Mr Yoshiya's phone.

"Kazuya, have you ever been scared of your daddy?" she doesn't look up from the glowing screen, poking away, eyes perhaps a bit more pensive than before. I don't answer right away – I can't. Taking several long sips of coffee, I mentally fumble for the right words.

"Sometimes," I say carefully.

She blinks, but the answer seems to please her. Explosions ripple across the screen under her expert fingers. "Mine says your daddy was in a war a long time ago too. That means we're the same," she says, as if relating a seemingly complicated concept that should have been simple to understand from the get-go.

Somehow, I know she's right. I saw it the moment we met. A barely hidden apprehension – a brave and smiling face put up as a shield against a harsh and unforgiving world, that way no one can see the real Nina hiding within. I wonder how much she knows about what her father has done back in the war? Does she know about the Special Operations Group, or the Siege of Tokyo-3? If we're the same like she claims, probably not. Now that I think about it, I can't imagine anyone in their right mind would relate that kind of stuff to a child.

The motors fail, joints jarring to a halt and coffee cup stopping just centimeters from my lips. I set it down on the table, the sweetness of the french vanilla cream turning rancid and bitter. That feeling swarms over me, a buzzing numbness as my mind drifts.

 _It's the Eva_. Mother used to whisper. _It's not him – it's the Eva._

Even after all this time, I've never understood what really lies behind those words. I was never made to understand. Whatever terrible things the Eva had done, still reaching its claws into my father's skull decades after the fact, it was too much for just a child to know. The story Toji Suzahara told me when I was nine, in retrospect, was almost cruel. How could he have expected a young boy to take that?

 _Like a man_. I imagine Hachiro, his eldest son, saying.

"He gets really angry sometimes," Nina mumbles, yanking my eyes across the table. "Mom says he can't help it, like a baby that cries. She says it's because of what he saw in the war. I don't really understand it." her dad's phone buzzes, splashing prisms of color in a very vibrant declaration that Nina has lost. She pushes it away, holding the phone in contempt. An iron gaze speaks of something deeper, the loss solidifying a disconnection from her father more than some silly game. "I wish he would talk to me about that stuff. I can listen as good as any adult. Did your daddy ever tell you about the war?" at last her eyes come to me, hopeful.

"No."

Her gaze falls, hands snatching the phone from the table. "Why's it have to be such a big secret?"

I sip at disgustingly sweet coffee to stall, shrugging. "Some things are too hard to talk about," I say, hating myself for parroting my mother. I can't believe I'm sitting here feeding this girl more lies. Or maybe there's more truth in that not-answer than I want to admit. How can I tell Nina anything about why her father doesn't talk about the war, when I barely understand it myself?

"I guess so." a grimace quirks at her lips, little fingers toying with her dad's cell.

It makes me realize just how lousy I would be as a father. I don't know how to deal with kids and I've never been able to stand the sound of a child crying. I don't want to be the cause of that. Just the idea of being responsible for someone else's happiness... it makes me sick. Makes me want to hide in the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean and never return to the waking world.

"There you are!"

In a flash, the real Nina is gone, replaced by the nothing-is-wrong-in-my-world illusion of her. She jumps up and runs to her father, my parents a few paces behind him. Even seeing her so sullen a moment ago, it's actually hard to say this part of her is just for show. Her smile is so full of love and adoration, nothing like the smiles I used to wear.

Are we really the same? Or is Nina just braver than I ever was?

The clerk at Terminal 15 calls for final boarding and I fish the ticket from my overcoat. The long ramp leading to the vessel beyond waits to swallow me whole. I turn my back on it, preparing myself for parting words. As I do, mother hugs me, so very content to just hold me – if only for a moment. I expected a lot of things from this trip. A cold reunion and a frigid departure, back to doing the same things I've always done. Has anything really changed? My mother's hugging me for the first time in years and I don't know how to feel about it.

My arms hesitate to rise, hands touching her back, unsure if I should squeeze back. "Goodbye, mom."

She pulls away before we can embrace for long, a soft touch to her voice. "Don't think I won't come up there if you don't call from now on, okay?"

"Alright," I say, unable to keep the corners of my mouth from stretching, just a little. She steps back, putting on a small smile for me. Father stays planted where he is and it takes all of my lasting resolve to hold his gaze. Deep-set ocean water eyes hide behind large bifocal glasses, his chin smooth and bare this time. The air between us is thick and constricting. Mechanically, I lift my right hand – before either of us can even consider attempting a hug. His rough, leathery hand takes hold of mine.

I try to swallow. "It was, uh... good to see you, dad."

"It was good to see you too, son."

Our hands break away and Nina quirks her head at this exchange, debating a puzzled frown. Yoshiya is there, hands resting on her shoulders. He gives me a nod and a smile. "Take care of yourself, Kazuya."

Mouth too dry for words, all I can do is nod in return.

Little Nina waves. "Bye, Kazuya!" those big eyes of hers seem to twinkle. _We share a secret, you and I_ , they say. I've been let into her world, past the barriers and mirrors. She's seen in me something that echoes her own truth.

I thump down the carpeted hall, never sparing a glance back and find my spot in 37A, a walkway seat. Grimacing, I hunker down and hope no one has the window beside me so I can steal it later. Knowing that I'll be home this afternoon is a strange and foreign concept, I almost can't believe it. Murmured conversation hovers over the seats, occasionally lost in the dull whine of turbines. Nina says we're the same, but at the very least she loves her father – and he has nothing but affection for her. It seems her parents try to make her understand, even if she isn't quite ready to comprehend the nature of her father's scars.

 _And you are?_ A voice suspiciously like my own laughs. As if to mock me further, I find those soft spoken words uttered in a bright afternoon hospital room by my mother:

 _"You never get over something like that..."_

 _"You never get over it."_

* * *

A pair of Ecclesiastes sit in the row next to me. The Third Eye blisters across the skin of their foreheads by way of scarred flesh, in the same manner their Goddess Lilith had once possessed. They are her messengers, bringers of order, preachers of her truth. So say the pamphlets I usually get in the mail. I can't be sure which branch they belong too, but from their rather sharp and clean business attire, I can guess they aren't one of the Western Trinity's more fanatical manifestations, often shrouded in mysticism and questionable cult practices.

Shin Seiki maybe? Out of all the whacked religions that spawned from Third Impact, the Reformed Shin Seiki Church of the New Trinity is arguably one of the more tame followings. If I remember right, they're the prevalent movement down southwest now. I remember watching their houses of worship sprout up all over Arizona. Even taking the buses around Tucson these past few days, I couldn't get more than a half-mile without seeing one.

I try to keep them out of mind. The flight takes forever, even though I paid a little extra for non-stop so I wouldn't have to transfer in Denver. With an hour until landing, I call Marina and let her know I'll be home soon. I've received approximately twenty texts since our last talk about how much she misses me, practically begging for my attentions. For the time being, I don't let it bother me, just sink a little more into the seat and let the roar of the plane's engines lull me into oblivion.

As we're pulling into port, I prepare myself for the inevitable and take another anxiety pill for the day, debating a mood-stabilizer with a half-grimace. I probably need it, what's the harm in taking another tablet? They were prescribed to be used, afterall.

My silver 2014 Mustang Convertible is waiting in the lot underneath Reagan Airport. Marina likes to call it Gypsy. It's the same color as some giant mech – codenamed Gypsy – in one of those cheesy post-Second Impact movies. Clambering inside, me and Gypsy get on George Washington Parkway following the Potomac river, D.C. proper visible across the way. I cross it at I-495 and arc over into my Silver Springs apartment complex. Fifteen stories tall and packed with overpriced studio compartments.

Me and my beloved are situated in room 303. I can hear the neighbor's kids as I step in – the upstairs neighbor that is. The living room makes up most of the space, kitchen and bathroom on the other side by the only window – which is draped with blackout curtains to make it completely dark inside.

"About time," Marina's voice travels over from the couch.

"Hey, sweetheart," I sigh, throwing my luggage and overcoat to the floor, a curse hissing free as I stumble into the kitchen. I can't stand the fact she has to exist in utter darkness all of the time. It's two in the afternoon dammit. I flick the kitchen lights on and throw the curtains open for good measure. Marina clicks her tongue as she pads across the carpet. The sun makes her caramel hair shine, curls falling along soft-cut features. I lean in, though the pout she gives me says she was hoping for something a little more passionate than the peck I give her. Her arms wrap around my waist and she earns a brief one-armed squeeze back, while I'm reaching to flick on the coffee pot. She reminds me of a puppy, bearing no concept of time and unable to tell that it's only been three days, not three years.

That makes me chuckle. "Look out."

She offers a plaintive noise and a slight, playful push. My keys clack on the bartop – wallet and phone joining them next.

"How was your trip?" she asks, leaning by the bathroom door.

I touch her as I pass into the living room, settling on the couch. "Okay, I guess."

I feel her move against the backrest, hands sliding over my neck and around my shoulders, thumbs kneading into knotted muscle. A pair of lips touch my neck, working their way down to my collar bone.

I jerk away, temper flaring. "Not now, Marina." I regret it instantly as her warmth recedes, collapsing on the bed with her back to me. A sigh. "I'm sorry, I'm just... really tired."

"You always are." she sits up, legs swinging over the edge of the mattress. "We haven't had sex for three months."

"Look, I just got back from seeing my parents and I... I just want to relax, okay?"

Her eyes roll and she shakes her head. "Whatever."

Normally I would just drop it, and she'd stew for a bit before we're able to talk again. This time her tone wriggles under my skin. "Are you really upset about this?"

"Just fucking forget it, Kazuya." Marina pushes off the bed, marching into the kitchen. "It's not like you care anyway."

Something – twists. This isn't like the other times we've argued, where I half-heartedly beg for her forgiveness, dejected because I feel like I shouldn't have to deal with her fickle whims. That thread of patience, drawn taut these past few days, snaps.

"Yeah, you're right, shame on me for not wanting to fuck you the instant I get home from seeing my mother in the hospital." I'm standing now, just outside the kitchen.

Marina laughs. "Oh please, she has a heart attack and suddenly give a shit about her?"

"You have no idea what you're talking about – Jesus Christ, I just went on a trip to meet people I was A-OK never having contact with again, but no, poor Marina had to go three days without me, _god forbid_."

"You could have brought me with you, jackass! But it's just way easier to forget you have a girlfriend if you leave her at home, right?"

"I was gone for three days, Marina! What the fuck did you even do? Did you sign up for medicare to cover that knee surgery you need? Did you apply for a college? Did you look for a second job? Did you do any of the shit I've been asking you to do for the past two years?"

Her eyes narrow. "Fuck you."

"Stop acting like child and _grow up_!"

"Look who's talking!" she snaps, jabbing my chest with a finger. "Big shot CIA man fucked up his first mission and works behind a desk so he can live in some shithole apartment for the rest of his life, crying about his mommy and daddy. Yeah, you've really grown up, Kazuya." she's got me backed into a corner now, nowhere to run. "I bet you just make it up, don't you? All that crap about your dad and his episodes – you just want people to feel sorry for you, don't you? You're just a spineless, worthless piece of–"

Anger, true anger, makes you someone else. Someone you don't know. This Kazuya, wrapped tight in a blistering hot coil, pushes Marina – shoves her hard so she hits the cabinets and knocks the coffee pot to the floor. Glass breaks, putrid brown oozing over the white tile. Neither of us move and everything is still, something I've always dreaded seeing bursting free in Marina's wide eyes.

"Go ahead... hit me." she squeaks, trying to swallow her fear, gripping the counter top edges for dear life. "You've always wanted to, right?"

I come back to myself, hands balled into fists and that hot, burning rage snaps cold – no, not cold. Freezing. "I'm... I'm sorry, Marina... I..."

She flinches as I take a step. "Get away from me. Don't come near me." then she's out of the kitchen, grabbing her purse and then her overcoat. The door creaks open and she turns to look me in the eyes, her own bleeding shattered hope and fractured hurt. "You're fucking crazy, you know that?" she whispers–

And then she's gone.

Nothing registers, at first. A daunting silence worms its way into the apartment, sliding into my ears until I can't hear anything but white noise.

"Fine," I bark, not quite able to manage a shout through the quiver in my voice – so I pick up a dirtied glass and hurl it at the closed door. I cling to those residuals of anger. I scream. "I don't need you! I don't need _anyone_!" I collapse against the counter, trying to stay standing while the world flips on its head. "Who the fuck needs you, anyway?"

No one answers and the question rings against the walls, while I wonder if it was meant for me or Marina. My heart just won't stop pounding, a panic attack rolling over my nerves and striking with splintering chills. I find my overcoat, fumbling for the anxiety pills I know are still there. I empty the bottle's contents into my hand, a glass of water at the sink helping them down. I know it's not enough to kill me, and a part of me resents that. They don't have time to do much before I fall to my knees, spilling my guts across the floor. Too much, too much. Too much emotion. Too much stress – _too much_.

A hammer begins to beat against my skull, a resounding crescendo that drives me to the floor, every vile and disgusting sickness pervading my body – reducing me to a wretched mess. But that quiet, that open, yawning, empty quiet is what really gets me. It waits patiently for the stockade to break. The floodgates are open, but the lake on the other side is desert dry.

Sitting against the cabinets seems only infinitesimally better than lying on the floor where gravity is trying to crush me into pulp. My right hand finds a phone from the counter top too.

No text messages. No missed calls. I think it's starting to get dark out. Hard to tell how long I've been in this stupid kitchen.

My fingers find a number. Not Marina's – but a number I hadn't even seen pop up since four days ago, simply labeled: _Home_.

An idea possesses me. An instinct. I hit the 'call' button. A ringer purrs, once, twice. On the fourth chime, I assume no one is around.

Then a click.

And my father's voice. "Hello?"

At first I'm stuck rigid – frozen. I never expected him to be the one to answer. "Hello?" he asks again.

I hang up, tossing the phone away as if burned. I feel like shit. Worse than that, I feel like a coward.

In the end, I really am just a child.

I can't hold it in anymore – I break.

"I'm sorry... god, I'm so sorry."

I don't care that the spilled brew is soaking into the linoleum and making it bubble, or that the coffee maker is pouring a fresh blend onto the sizzling burner. The tears just keep flowing and I couldn't hold back the shuddering sobs if I tried.

I'm just like him.

I'm just like my fucking father.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** It's been a busy month. Should be able to get back to weekly updates now. I _could_ take my time, but then this story would never get done. Once that happens, I'll come back to it one day and work a little harder on fleshing out Kazuya and Marina's relationship, but for now, this will do to get us through the rest of the story. Drop off comments/thoughts if you have any.


	12. Interlude VI

**Interlude VI**

My mother had a falling out with her father a decade ago. Since then, we haven't talked to the Langley side of the family, small though it may be.

Everyone on my dad's side isn't around anymore. I can't say for sure what exactly happened. I've only been told that his mother died when he was real young. The name Gendo Ikari was spoken only once in my presence, and used as a barb by my mother at that. It was strange to learn about a grandfather I would never meet through grade school History lessons.

 _Gendo Ikari, first Rokubungi, was a Japanese scientist and Commander of the paramilitary organization NERV and considered to be at the center of Third Impact –_ reads one of the entries.

He was sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection in 2021.

The Ottawa trials had been going on since late 2017. Normally, the ICC wouldn't be able to sentence anyone under its jurisdiction to death. Grandpa Ikari was the singular reason a Review Conference was held in Berlin to vote for an amendment that would allow the death penalty to be issued for ICC trials.

The tally was almost unanimously for it.

I can't say I know much else about the trials, even though they were some of the most important in recent history. Some other higher-ups were caught in the fallout, slapped with thirty years to life in prison. I don't know their names or what they did. It was just another part of the war that I didn't care to learn about. I still remember, back in college, what a shock it was when I discovered my parents were actually involved in the entire mess. They'd been put on trial like all the others, pardoned despite being accused of taking part in genocide.

I couldn't ask them about it at the time. I was twenty and still fresh off my departure from home – the fracture that broke an already strained relationship. I was beginning to understand the significance of their lineage and their vaguely touched upon roles in the Angel War – something they'd always kept from me.

It only gave me more reason to distrust them.

Third Impact was a dark time most of my professors were tight-lipped about. For them, the apocalypse was still too fresh and raw. For me, the world hadn't ended at all. It was always this twisted, on-the-brink-of-collapse game to eek out an existence. The conflicts of the past were more of a dream. Mythical and always told with too much of the tale missing or embellished. Just the idea of it is something I still grapple with.

It was even more of a surprise finding out my mother had authored most modern textbooks on Metaphysics. The experiences of my youth became much clearer after that revelation.

Ever since middle school, when teachers found out my last name, I was held to some higher standard. I was expected to be exceedingly perfect in every activity I pursued. It wasn't anything new, mother never accepted anything less than my fullest potential. Then at eleven years old suddenly it was expected of me everywhere and from everyone.

"You'll do great things one day, Kazuya," they'd say – and I basked in that praise, that undisguised pride. I took every ounce of it and built a little rosary to keep me happy. I didn't have any friends to share it with. Not even my mother, who knew all too well what it was like living with my father, could fill that role for me. She was always gone, or on business, or shut off from me because of her nightmares.

I wanted to be the best. I _had_ to be the best – for her. If I was the best, maybe she would praise me, or stay at home with me, or try and get to know me as desperately as I wanted to know her.

I knew that she was born and raised in Berlin. Her father was an Army Colonel from Tennessee. She went to Heidelberg University when she was eleven and graduated at thirteen. Her favorite color was red. She hated stuffed animals and used to like to play the violin.

That was all she ever really allowed me to know. I needed more.

Despite my best efforts, life at home became less and less bearable. My father's PTSD was always lingering in the shadows, always had me on edge in a place I should've felt safe. My mother's patience wore thin and her stress bled out into everything she said and did. She'd snap at the drop of a hat, going off on a curse-laden tirade. If I scored below an A on an assignment, it was a lecture. If I lost a Soccer game. If my room wasn't clean. If I left dishes in the sink. A lecture. Disappointment.

Eventually I'd had enough. I started to stand up to her, to fight back. My mother isn't the kind of woman to back down – for anything. It's her way or the highway. The only person I've ever seen her give any ground to is my father, and it's begrudgingly at that. The more and more we fought, the less I applied myself at school, and the praise I received from my teachers turned into reprimands when my grades plummeted. "You used to be such a hard working boy, Kazuya. Don't you want to get into a good school? Surely you don't want to disappoint your mother?"

It didn't matter if it was what I wanted. She was always disappointed anyway. I could see it. In the way she fixed me with a cold look as we sat in the Principal's office. Or how her shoulders sagged when we got home, dejected, as I tried to apologize. She'd heard it too many times before.

It got to the point where I couldn't focus on any of the lessons. I stopped caring whether or not homework was finished. I just locked myself in my room, waiting for the next day to drag by and continue to endure. The thresholds of my mother's temper reached new lows. Nights often ended in screaming matches between us. Running to Misato's wasn't enough of an escape once I turned fourteen, so I isolated myself – trading spiteful, petty insults with my mother whenever we crossed paths.

I was spiraling into a black pit and I didn't know how to stop. There were these gray, gnarled, stringent emotions all knotted up inside. It was the Eva - that stupid fucking Eva my father carried with him.

There was a secret war I couldn't ever tell anyone about. I had fantasies of doing exactly that, telling my teachers about all of the crazy shit that happened. Then they would feel sorry for me and try to comfort me. I never did anything like that. I was afraid, more than anything, that no one would believe me. That, and admitting my parents worked for NERV would've been like someone walking around a post-WWII Germany and admitting their parents were Nazis.

When people asked what they did for a living, I always made up some lie, some happy memory that didn't exist. My dad's a policeman and he helps lots of people! My mother's an engineer for NASA! Something noble, at times extravagant. Something that I could be proud of. When other kids were impressed or envious, looking at me with wide and curious eyes, it made me feel less alone in the world. Some nights after an episode, I'd comfort myself by imagining I had an older brother, someone to confide in and share in my suffering. It was the reason I always held a small amount of resentment towards the Suzahara brothers. I would have given anything to have what they shared.

Back when my father's symptoms first started, he lost his job at the news agency in Panama City after decking one of his coworkers. In the span of four years he worked his way through twelve different jobs. His PTSD used to get so bad he couldn't hold any of them down for long. No boss wanted that mess on their hands. It turned into such an awful track record no one would even give him the courtesy of an interview. He was cast to the wayside, unwanted, occasionally exiled for more personal vendettas. Usually, everyone took the Soryu name at face value, rarely putting up much of a fuss. But if anyone did any digging, paid for more thorough background checks and found out my dad was actually an Ikari, that was when we had to annex ourselves from the community completely.

Here in the states most people still hold Japan in contempt for Third Impact, punishing its soldiers for the machinations of its leaders. The Japanese that managed to resettle remembered things a little differently. A group in Hokkaido made something for my parents. Coming home from school, I noticed a new picture hanging in the hallway. In the living room beyond, dad was rummaging through an open box. There was one for my mother too, but I don't remember her ever opening it.

In the picture, there were these tall twin towers flanked by a series of smaller skyscrapers, silhouetted against a rich orange sky – I remember them from when dad used to take me down to the bakery and reminisce about Tokyo-3 in the sunset. A white cross sat in the background over golden hues. At the bottom, inscribed in silver against the black, just two words:

 _Thank you_.

I didn't know who sent the boxes, how they found us – maybe it was the Soryu surname they latched onto. It didn't matter. I didn't care. The war was ruining my life and here it was in our hallway, glorified – _honored_ – in glass and ebony frame. Those people on that wreck of an island didn't know my father at all. If they saw what he was really like, no one would ever thank him.

They also gave him some memorabilia that must've been popular on the home island: a black nylon jacket with _01_ in white on the back. I think it was his unit designation back in the war. It fits him just right, though he looks a bit uncomfortable in it, as if he's uncertain about even wearing it. _Proud Angel Fighter_ , it says on the left shoulder.

"Nobody cares you were in some stupid war," I sneer as I walk by, pausing at the base of the stairs. "All you did was make everybody miserable."

He doesn't say anything, doesn't try to defend himself or all the horrible things everyone says he did. He just gets this sad sort of look and takes the jacket off, stowing it away in the closet where he never touches it again.

For the next five years that picture of the Tokyo-3 towers hung in our hallway.

I smashed it to pieces when I left.


	13. Chapter 7: December 1

**Chapter 7: December 1**

My name is Kazuya Langley Soryu.

My father kept my mother's last name, for obvious reasons. My middle name is from Grandfather Langley, even though he was a Soryu for his first marriage.

I like to think I was gifted that name because my mother still held some lasting fondness for a father who was never around much when she was growing up. I create that fantasy because I don't really know. In reality, she probably chose it in case I ever needed something more American to use in social situations. Just in case I entered an area where the Japanese were even more unwelcome than they already were. Forty something years after Third Impact, it's not so bad anymore. Sometimes a drunk might spit at me and call me a "dirty fucking Jerry", but that's about as far as it goes.

This morning I ride Gypsy out to Headquarters. My Department is nestled in the old headquarters building put up back in the 1950s. Winter has kicked into full gear and it's cold as hell. I thought I'd miss this after visiting Arizona, but all I can think about is how much I want to get inside so my feet and hands don't snap off from frostbite.

It's only 34 degrees here.

Checkpoints are passed, polite nods given to other passing officers. Everyone mostly keeps to themselves.

For my part, I sit in an office all day and shuffle files from one server to another. In the middle of that process, documents have to be reviewed, old records have to be analyzed for inconsistencies, marked for classification and then refiled if some asshole upstairs fucked up the paperwork. It's the kind of menial, thankless crap that no one thinks about when the CIA comes to mind – but someone has to do it.

"Kazuya," a voice growls from the open door of a windowed office. "Glad to have you back."

I don't know how he sees me through the very literal mountain of paperwork on his desk. I can't even see _him_ behind it. A manilla folder slides out from the middle, somehow leaving a small slit where I can see the Chief's eyes. "All quiet on the western front?"

He always has the worst jokes. I force a chuckle. "For now."

"Good, good." he seems to nod, and a hand reaches over the mountain to offer me a folder. "Sorry to saddle you with this right back on the job, but I need these on priority. Blackbagging ops in Serbia. Two thousand thirteen. Not classified anymore."

Taking it in hand, I mentally prepare myself for diving into the servers to find all of it. "Sure thing."

I stop by my desk, which is only slightly more spacious than everyone else's in the Department. There's already a few other assignments waiting at my In slot. It's a constant war of attrition to make sure I don't end up as scattered and backed up as the Chief.

"Langley." a deadpan voice says. It belongs to a simple long-sleeved white shirt, short jet black hair and brown eyes sporting dark rings under them. Philip – tells everyone to call him Pip – takes a sip from his coffee. "Good weekend? Sucked here. Inbox's backed up. Carrie was a bitch. More than usual," he says in that same quiet monotone that makes him sound forever tired.

He keeps walking before I can say anything.

As far as I know, Pip doesn't really like anybody. So at the very least I know he doesn't dislike me because I'm Japanese. Most people in the Department know me as a Langley. You'd think that an office block full of CIA officers, people who supposedly have a very keen eye for irregularities and misdirection, never bothered to see past the guise and discover me for a Soryu. Well, most people except the Section Chief and Carrie.

I find her around the corner, leaning against the copier. Thin blonde hair, pale complexion and slim red lips I've gotten very familiar with in the past. Carrie Bulkeley, in her own way, is a lot like me. I think it's why we never really got along in the end. She saw right through me with those sharp green eyes. From the moment I borrowed a pen and she caught me staring at the sway of her hips as she walked off.

It was the start of a tumultuous relationship that was more or less an unspoken agreement to be Friends with Benefits. We'd get wasted in some shitty bar, have sex at her flat, and come back into work the next morning like nothing had ever happened. Things turned sour when we started trying to pursue an actual relationship. I guess neither of us knew how to deal with it.

She grants me a cursory glance. "You look like shit."

"I feel like shit."

"Trouble with the mis'ess?"

I know she's mostly joking, but my temper sky rockets. "Fuck off, please and thank you."

She _tsks_ and slaps my shoulder with the folder in her hand. "God, you're such a dick."

I give her a wink. "Only for you."

"I feel so special," she deadpans, throwing hair over a shoulder. "Seriously, what's got you?"

A big sigh, hands shuffling through my _In_ files. "Parents, girlfriend... and Shamal didn't mark up these goddamn requisition reports from thirty-four."

"Welcome to the Directorate of Intelligence."

I grunt, moseying into the adjacent breakroom where there's three hour old coffee and a mumbling T.V.

"You hear about Macedonia?" Carrie nods to the screen. "SOG team got hit by somebody in Thessaloniki. All KIA. Chief says it was probably PLA Spec Ops. Clandestine really screwed up this time."

"It happens. That's the game."

"Doesn't mean it _should_ happen. Especially after Beijing."

I give her a flat grimace. Hard to argue that one, even if it was a few years ago now. It's one of the many things I both like and dislike about her. She's honest, generally well-meaning, but in your face and condescending about it all in one package. That's Carrie. Always making sure I never get too accustomed to the practice of self-deception.

Operation Hourglass, my very first case, wasn't supposed to end with the deaths of two innocent Chinese women and a CIA officer. I wasn't directly responsible, but my information wasn't right – and information is everything in the CIA.

That was pretty much the end of my career with the Clandestine Department. The higher ups decided I still had useful skills – archiving documents and analyzing old records. They let me keep my paygrade since I'd already been with the agency for a few years. It was a merciful sentence in light of how bad I'd fucked up.

My phone buzzes. A text. I panic a little, hoping it isn't Marina, but really hoping it is. No, I can't deal with this at work. I'm not ready.

From: Yuki Aida: _Me and dad are in town – buy me a drink?_

* * *

At exactly 4:17, August 4, 2031, Kensuke Aida fell off the U.S. Supercarrier _Abraham Lincoln_. Well, not exactly fell off, more or less thrown off by the exhaust from a jet blast as a fighter crossed the arresting wires with just a little too much power. It was at this point he was blown towards the mesh of nets surrounding the drop off of the flight deck, mounted to save his life in case of such a mishap. Except it did not account for the scrawny Navy boy also getting picked up on the wind by his loose jacket. It was fortuitous then that the jet engine test area, at the aft of the carrier where he was standing, stuck out just so from the flight deck. It was also doubly lucky that an engine wasn't being tested at the time, or else Kensuke would've been a very crispy corpse.

He broke four ribs, dislocated his right shoulder and fractured a femur.

It's his favorite story to tell.

Sitting at a bar down the street, I'm listening to the fourth rendition. Kensuke has his dress blues on. Always puts on his best when he gets to see his daughter. Yuki herself has settled for the simpler tan service uniform. A Navy girl, just like her dad raised her.

She takes her peaked cap off with a sigh. "Thank you, dad. That was just as riveting as the _first_ thirty times I heard it."

The man laughs, taking a gulp from his beer and adjusting his glasses, the rectangular and efficient kind. "Kazuya hasn't heard it before, right?"

I don't have the heart to tell him I have. Plus it just further frustrates Yuki when I shake my head and Kensuke taps her shoulder with a backhand, saying, "See?"

She rolls her eyes, moving an errant lock of shoulder-length oak hair. She's also got a bit of red on her cheeks – and not from the cold outside. Kensuke is the boisterous sort, even after being in the military for thirty-two years now. It's relatively quiet in the bar tonight and there's a band towards the back playing some Christmas piece. Chief Petty Officer Aida has been loudly reminiscing about his youth in the Navy, much to the embarrassment of his only daughter. The myriad of patrons have been throwing us glances, but little more. Nobody disrespects a man in uniform, even if they are just another Jerry.

He finishes off his glass and knocks on the bartop, signaling for another. "So how's your ma', Kazuya? Just got back in, haven't heard from your dad since last week."

I shrug, offer a weak smile. I know them too well to try and pretend much. "Fine. Doc says she needs to keep her blood pressure down."

He huffs, fresh mug in his hand. "I could've told her that for free. Actually, I have."

"Not in those exact words," Yuki chides, finishing off her third glass. A curious smirk pokes at her cheeks. "I think she gave you a black eye, didn't she?"

He grumbles a bit, scratching at his close-cropped hair. "Fun fact: just because you're in a military base doesn't mean you're safe from PMS. No offense, Kazuya, but you know how she is. Always had a temper, ever since we were kids. Knew she'd be a handful the minute I met her."

I _do_ know how she is, but this is the first I've heard of that particular incident. Either her moods must've been on a shorter leash or she's never taken much of a liking to Kensuke – it's hard to tell what kind of men she does and does not approve of. I want to ask him about it, managing to keep my mouth shut anyway. If I give in to that ravenous curiosity, I'll be losing to something I've left deep and buried since I was in college. Plus, I don't want it out in the open that Kensuke Aida might know more about my parents than I do.

"Didn't you first meet her on an aircraft carrier?" Yuki asks, still with that quizzical expression.

My eyebrows tighten and I blink. "What?"

Kensuke gets this big smile. "Yep. We all did. You should ask your dad about that one, Kazuya. He'd probably tell it better than I could."

I can't hold this one back. It's just the strangest thing I've ever heard. Or maybe it's strange because I'm trying to conjure up an image of what my parents even looked like when they were young – and I can't. "They met on an aircraft carrier?"

"It was right after the, uh, which one was it...?" he looks up to the ceiling, hand rubbing his chin.

"Fifth Angel, dad."

"Right!" he says, snapping his fingers. "Sixth Angel showed up that day while we were on the carrier. Sunk half the damn Pacific Fleet." he shakes his head a bit.

A fleet? An entire fleet was attacked by an Angel – and my parents were there? That's how they met? I have too many questions to ask and not enough mouths to ask them all at once. My lips part with a question and Kensuke's watch beeps. He pulls up a sleeve and grimaces.

"Well, I've got a date down at the courthouse. Don't ever get married."

Yuki frowns. "But you _like_ Frederic."

"I was talking to Kazuya – always good to see you." he reaches over and we shake hands. "You know, it's still not too late for you to join the Navy."

"No offense, but I think I'd throw myself overboard before I had the chance to fall off."

That makes him laugh and he claps me on the shoulder. Yuki gets up for a parting hug. She fusses over his uniform as they separate, brushing off his shoulders, fixing and straightening his jacket. His hard, wizened features become a little softer as he grins, settling his cap on right.

"Thanks, sweetheart."

"Love you, dad." she kisses him on the cheek, making him chuckle as he leaves. It's only late afternoon as he marches out into orange hues.

"Sorry," Yuki says after a minute, a bit of guilt settling over her expression. "I forgot you don't–"

"So where's Frederic?" I ask, trying to focus on the football game up across the big flat screen.

Yuki doesn't falter. "Still out on deployment. He'll be back around March. _I'll_ be out with Seventh Fleet."

I imagine that must be hard, having a fiancé in the Army, always in different places across the world. Yuki doesn't seem to mind it too much. She's been a military brat all her life. Kensuke joined the U.S. Navy in 2021, so she's always had a soft spot for military men and a strong dislike for civilian women ever since her mom up and left a few days before her fifth birthday.

Yuki and Frederic have been engaged for four years now and her father is currently working his way through a third divorce. They usually get their leave to line up, but can't talk about where they're being deployed next or what they'll be doing. I poke fun by asking her if she's going to get married on a boat too. She doesn't think that's so funny. At times, she even seems a little worried over it. I guess she's all too familiar with her dad's track record and doesn't want any of the same.

Her voice stuns me out of the bottom of my glass. "You can't keep doing that, you know."

"What?" I ask, spoken more like a challenge – daring her to continue.

She taunts me with a sad smile. "Keep everything bottled up like that."

"How is my personal life anybody's business?"

Her hands cup my face and she turns me to look at her. "That's what I'm talking about, Kazu. You can't keep pushing people away. Open your heart a little, hm?" her right hand pats my cheek – _good boy_. Standing, she tugs on her uniform and fits her cap on. "Anyway, I've got to be heading out too. Next one's on me, okay?"

"Sure."

 _Like you're one to talk, Yuki_. I don't want to fight with her over it. I care about her too much. Or maybe I'm scared she'll eventually leave me too. I lost that fight when I was fifteen, but at least we're still friends and at least we still talk. I don't know if that makes it better or worse.

Yuki nudges my arm. "Hey, are you sure you're okay?"

I lift my mug, plastic smile and all. "Yup."

She shakes her head, but smiles anyway. "I'll see you around, then."

"See ya'."

 _Open your heart_ , she says. As if it's the easiest thing in the world once you get the hang of it. Since I've known her, Yuki's been the kind of girl that wears her heart on her sleeve. We were an odd pair at fifteen. She, expressive and emotional. Then me, quiet and moody.

I pay our tab, trying to keep those Summer memories from surfacing.

The apartment is quiet. Marina hasn't called or texted and all of her things are still here. I wonder when she's going to come get them. I can only assume we're done for – it's over. Part of me hopes that's the case, that way I can just give up and go back to being on my own.

People are hard to deal with.

Two years ago, I was in yet another therapy session, trying to make it seem like I was doing something to better myself. In actuality, the only reason I'd gone was because it had been mandated by my department that I go for yearly checkups. I quit out after my slated two weeks were up. I didn't really want to hear what she had to say, or try and reach deep down to some hidden truth.

I was afraid.

In those two weeks, that stranger got to know me better than I did.

 _"Why do you want to know about the war?" she asks, pencil touching her lower lip._

 _I shrug. "I feel like if I know the war, then I'll know my father."_

 _She nods, even smiles a bit. "There are a lot of ways to get to know someone. Just as many ways to forgive someone too."_

So I decide to call again tonight. Not to offer forgiveness, that's a chasm I don't think I'll ever be able to cross. It's something else – something desperate, I guess. An inherent need to connect with someone. Anyone.

I consider just hanging up when my father answers: "Hello?"

"Hey, dad," I blurt, before I freeze up like last time.

A pause. "Everything alright, Kazuya?"

 _Of course_. In his eyes, why else would I call unless something was wrong? Well, something is wrong, but I don't want to talk about that.

"I'll get your mother, hang on."

"Uh, wait, I... I actually called to talk to you, dad."

"What about?" he sounds suspicious.

I fidget, stuttering a moment. _What the hell do I do from here?_ "Kensuke said that– you and mom met on an aircraft carrier, during the Angel War."

 _Very smooth, Kazuya._

"Oh, I..." he trails off and there's just quiet for a bit. I start to panic and it gets harder to breathe. I've fucked up again. I've mentioned the Angel War. He's going to have another episode. He's going to slip into the crater and start screaming.

"We did, but... I don't want to talk about that... sorry."

I try not to sound disappointed. "No, that's okay. I'll just – I'll just talk to mom, then."

He hands off the phone and I feel so completely stupid. Just a stupid little kid. It rips me open how right Marina was – and she knew it. She was so sure of it, so wounded she had to cut me up right back. I can barely pay attention as me and mother trade "hellos and how are yous" and find something trivial and non-family related to talk about.

I really want to hit something. This is unhealthy.

I think she can sense something's wrong. She doesn't ask and I wish I could tell her. I don't have any idea how. I'm still trying to get comfortable with the idea of talking to her again. I know she's going to misunderstand anyway, think I'm ticked at her or something. I can't tell her that's not what's wrong.

She tells me goodbye, tells me dad has one more thing to say and hands the phone back. On the other end, I can hear his footsteps and the creak of a door.

"Your mom's birthday is coming up soon," he says.

I glance at the calendar. December 1st – shit, she'll be turning 54 in three days.

"Uh, yeah... what should I get her?"

Birthdays have always been a strange affair in our house. Dad received them awkwardly – if he was out of his room that week – and mother made a big fuss over hers, demanding extravagant tribute. It was the one occasion me and my father teamed up to get her something really special. As for my own, I stopped caring when I was around eleven and the celebrations died down for all of us. Each one was just a countdown until I'd finally be old enough to leave. It was the only real reason I looked forward to it.

"She's always been hard to buy for," dad concedes, pausing again. He sounds nervous. "I was thinking... she... your mom's been working a lot... at the lab and... I think she could use a vacation. What if she went up and stayed with you for her birthday? You both can catch up some more and you can show her around Washington. I think she'd like that."

My first response is _No_. I clench my teeth to keep from saying it. I have to at least give it some consideration. There are 20 days a year I can use to be absent from work. Not using some from last year, I've built up at least a month's worth of time off. But this has to be the worst possible time for it. I don't feel confident in dealing with either of my parents in any... close capacity. It's fine now that they're seven states away.

"Will you be coming too?" I ask and for a while only phone static answers me.

"I... no, I wouldn't want to get in the way, or anything."

Dad says he'll pay for the plane ticket. We agree to fly her out on December 3rd and fly her back on the 6th. Neither of us says goodbye as we hang up. I dial the Chief to let him know when I'll be using my days again.

The kitchen is still marred with dried spills of coffee – and vomit. I pop a few mood-stabilizers. I'm only supposed to take one, but I need the other two to replace the missing anxiety meds. That's how medication works, right? It makes me feel blissfully mellow. Something in me supposes I should pick up the glass from the floor too. Instead, I pass out on the couch, shoes and all. I don't take my anti-nightmare pills.

I don't deserve that reprieve tonight.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** Apparently, CIA employees aren't referred to as Agents, but Officers. I think the only employees at the CIA referred to as Agents are the Special Agents that operate in their Internal Affairs equivalent. _The more you know_.

SOG - Special Operations Group, a department of the Special Activities Division.

PLA - People's Liberation Army.

 **EDIT:** Forgot to mention. The use of the term Jerry is taken from _The Creative Principle_ and the Japanese Refugee and Resettlement Initiative. JRRI for short, spawning the nickname "Jerry". I'm also aware that this term, funnily enough, is shared with the WWII slang for German soldiers.


	14. Interlude VII

**Interlude VII**

One day my mother sat me down on the couch, something anxious in her posture. I think I was thirteen. I ran through the week's events for anything I might have done to upset her, and prepared myself for the inevitable firestorm.

She sits an arm's length away, pursing her lips a moment. "Kazuya, we're going to talk about sex."

I stand to leave, stopped by the snap of her fingers. She points down. _Sit_. I've experienced her temper – pushed it to the breaking point enough to know when to back down.

She readjusts herself, hands folding in her lap. "What do you know?"

"I don't want to talk about this, mom."

"Too bad."

I glare at her. "Not doing it."

"I can make this _very_ unpleasant," she says, voice low and controlled. Dangerous. I probably should've been thankful she hadn't exploded yet. I think it was simply the subject matter that saved me. Attitude was not well received. Ever.

So I shut up and she began the most embarrassing – and easily the most uncomfortable – afternoon talk of my life. I always thought this was something an adolescent boy was supposed to hear about from their father. But he wasn't there.

Again.

It had stopped being such a surprise at this point in my life, though left its wounds all the same. Each time, I grew to resent him a little more. It reinforced my belief that he never really cared about me. He couldn't be bothered to sit down with his son, talk with him about being a man.

I wasn't worth the effort.

From my mother, the Metaphysics Professor, it was detached, clinical and involved very precise wording, like I was in one of her classes. She explained to me, with _unwanted specificity_ , how erections happen, why they're normal and that masturbation is also normal, after which she then threatened to beat me senseless if she ever caught me in the act. That was the mother I was more familiar with. The one who was crass and overbearing.

By that point, I just had my face buried in my hands – wishing for some freak accident to kill me, like a falling airplane or an earthquake. She went on to inform me about condoms and why I shouldn't even be having sex until I was at least eighteen.

For the first time in seven years, I prayed to God again just to ask him to make her stop. I wasn't answered for another hour.

As awkward as it was, for both of us – she kept looking away and losing her train of thought – I think she found my discomfort more than a little funny. In that knowing kind of way where parents get a kick out of torturing their children through embarrassment.

It didn't really prepare me for how to deal with women. Some things are intuitive, other things that should have been taught man to man just weren't there. I didn't have an older brother like Hachiro to boast about their exploits in great detail. My father definitely wasn't there to guide me through the minefield either. All the examples I had of male and female interaction were inherently broken, bitter and petty. There were some tender moments. They were rare, but they were heartfelt on a level I could only wonder at.

One night, as the moonlight pooled through the house in soft blue rays, I stirred. The air was thin and chilled as I came from downstairs. It was after one of mother's nightmares, I think. I spied them down the hall on the floor, father's back against the wall while she was nestled against him, gathered in his arms. She'd calmed down some when she decided to speak.

"Tell me some things you like about me," she says, quietly. For a moment, I see that hardened facade fall and I see the warmth in their closeness, how easy and wanted it is. On this night, she is weak and she needs him. For just a moment, she needs validation – only from him.

Only ever from him.

He says he doesn't think her scars are ugly. He says he thinks she's pretty and smart. "And you're strong," he whispers, "even when you don't want to be. You're always so strong."

My parents were hard people, jaded. At times I wondered if they even loved each other. I so rarely saw that side of them and mother only allowed herself to be that way with him. I was jealous of that. Not because she didn't treat me with affection or kindness, but because I never saw her without the walls like he did.

There was only one time I ever asked my father about girls.

"What do you do when you like a girl?"

He paused. "Ask her if she likes you back, I suppose."

His gaze lingered on me, contemplating talking further. I left the room before he had the chance. I didn't want to talk to him more than I had to.

It was straight forward, but not what I needed. I was laughed at the next day and told that I was "weird".

A year later, I was fourteen and Summer was around the corner. Before I fell out of control and slipped into the deep canyon that formed from a crumbling relationship with my parents, the Aida's had come to visit and one of them was going to stay for a little while.

Yuki Aida was my first _real_ love. I first met her when I was four and she was only a year older than me. We still lived in Panama then and Kensuke was stationed at the base in Jacksonville for a couple of years. Playdates would often be arranged before then Petty Officer Third Class Aida was deployed overseas on his newly assigned ship, the USS _Dwight D. Eisenhower_. They'd been up at the Kitsap Navy Base for the past year or so when our parents agreed Yuki would stay with us while her dad was sent off to a war zone.

When I asked her where, she smiled and said, "It's a secret. You're not in the military, so I can't tell you."

She got postcards from him almost every week. It became the brightest part of my day, watching her run into the house with our mail, giddy grin on her face. The soldiers in uniform hadn't knocked on our door that morning, either. Everything was still right with her world.

Even though she said it was secret, Yuki was too proud of her dad not to share them with me. He was out by the Philippines, a place of emerald mountains and teal waters. It was just a postcard, so we didn't see the burning jungles or sinking ships like he did.

Yuki was a puzzle to me. Not like the other girls at school, who were almost alien in thinking and might ostracize me if I didn't understand their unspoken language. She was a rip tide of emotion that could flip to tranquil waters in the blink of an eye. It was exciting, how freely she expressed herself. No false looks, scared eyes, or pained grimaces like my parents.

Yuki was only ever Yuki. With her, I didn't have to be so grown up all the time. I could just be me, too. She was a connection to the world I'd lost a long time ago. I had it back and I didn't ever want to let go.

Even so, there was always something hidden behind her smile. I always wondered. She could've stayed at Kitsap, could have been with other military kids. People who more readily understood her and accepted her without question. So why decide to stay in a house with dysfunctional adults and a socially awkward boy?

The answer came much later. For the moment it wasn't important. A curtain had been drawn to let the light in. The sun was bright and new, the sky spirited and vibrant. Yuki was a spark of life in a world darkened by war and loss.

If I wanted to stay inside, she'd come and drag me out of my room. Usually at dawn, far too early for anything human to be up. When I slurred something along those lines and curled into a ball, she threw the covers off, exclaiming, "A warrior's spirit always rises with the sun!"

On those sweltering days we'd take long misshapen sticks and pretend we were Samurai. I made her knuckles bleed once and instead of crying, she baseball swung me in the side. Ribs blasting with pain, I fell to my knees, but couldn't stop laughing. That's kind of how we got even at times, odd as it may seem. If you hurt somebody, you got hurt back. It just made sense.

Other days we'd take the buses to Saguaro and explore the dry, cacti riddled hills and search for Groundsnakes. They were small and elusive, the hunt made all the more challenging due to the many venomous rattlers hidden beneath shrubs or stones. We scored points based on the color of the snake we found, red-orange earning the most.

Mother was, more often than not, nervous. Not about the snakes – we didn't tell her about that. She would've had a heart attack a lot sooner if she ever knew. What worried her was that she had two teenagers she couldn't keep tabs on because of her work, and Dad kept to himself – while Misato occasionally drove us out to the bar she worked at for a bite to eat. Most of the time we were left to our own devices. That got her antsy, even though we'd already had _The Talk_.

Nearly every night mother would ask me what we did, bordering an interrogation. My dad would shoot her a look and shake his head, warning her off the subject. Whatever quiet conversations they had about us in their room, they both seemed to be glad I had made a friend in someone.

Gradually, it became something more than that. Yuki wasn't particularly busty or shapely, but she was pretty and she was a girl living in my house. That's all that was needed for an attraction to build. I'd never really thought of her in much of a sexual way before. Sure, I'd seen her in a bikini when we went for a swim, but she was, first and foremost, my friend.

It was something I was slow to awaken to. All in one night someone shined a light on it and I couldn't ignore that whispering other anymore.

Yuki liked to wear her dad's shirts to bed. The long-sleeved button up kind that were too baggy on a fifteen year old girl. She came to hang out in my room and watch TV, like we usually did. She'd forgotten, or purposely left undone, the top buttons and I caught the curve of pale flesh. I told her I could see her breasts, to which she shrugged and said, "You're my friend. I don't care if you see me naked."

"Prove it."

She shrugged again and stood, unbuttoning the rest and tossing the shirt aside, hands sitting on her hips. "See?"

I saw it all. Something stirred in me, blood rushing with warmth. Yuki stepped closer to where I sat on the bed, expression cloudy.

"What?" she asked and without quite understanding the intent behind them, my hands moved to touch her hips, slow and uncertain. She bit her lower lip, but didn't protest. My fingers glided up and she gasped, soon pressing herself against me on the bed.

Our exploration was fumbling, sloppy, nervous. We got the hang of it a bit. We kissed, fooled around a little. We didn't have sex. That was something still far too nebulous and foreign to pursue.

As the next morning came, we wordlessly climbed out of bed, took our separate showers, trying to figure out how to look at each other now. We went on exploring the mountains of Arizona, a barrier between us. Everything was different. She didn't sit quite so close to me on the couch, or sleep in my room and keep me up all night talking about the stars.

Two weeks passed by before Yuki told me she was going back up to Kitsap. Summer had come to an end and the conflicts in the east kept _Eisenhower_ at foreign ports. I was... heartbroken.

I always assumed she'd be staying until her dad got back. So I asked her again why she stayed here, instead of at Kitsap.

We were sitting outside and she curled her knees to her chest, trying to make herself small, the real Yuki hidden behind those ochre eyes. "Me and my dad– we move around a lot. I begged him to let me stay here instead of Kitsap. Sure, there are lots of other kids like me on the bases, but they're always gone after a few months. I got so sick of watching everyone leave."

All she could do was stand by and watch as friends came and went, connections slipping completely out of her control. Nothing she could do to stop it all. Yuki wanted to say goodbye, but on her terms. I was the ideal choice – lots of civilians go their entire lives living in the place they grew up, not like military kids, where home is whatever base their parents happen to be stationed at that year.

I knew she'd have to leave eventually, go wherever the Navy decided her dad was needed most. This was all too sudden.

We were young and didn't know what to do with this newfound spectrum of emotion. For Yuki, she had let us get too close and just the idea of me leaving her one day, however unlikely, was something she couldn't face. Even if it was just in the sense of friends being too far to maintain contact anymore. Her mother never wrote or called, why would I? Compartmentalizing and cutting off was the only way she knew how to handle it. She'd been trying to escape from the military and its nomadic ways. Yet when she finally got close to someone, it scared her and she fell right back into it.

None of it was quite so clear then.

It was my first day back to school the morning she was supposed to leave. Some military family friendly with the Aida's were coming to take her up to Kitsap with them. It was dark out when I left – earlier than even she would be awake. I denied her that final goodbye, abandoning her the same way I felt abandoned.

 _You hurt me, I hurt you.  
_  
That was the rule.

It was a rotten thing to do.

I was still wounded for a time after, especially with how things ended between me and my parents. Yuki and I didn't really reconnect again until I was twenty. After that last Summer with her, I fell into a bitter cycle searching for closeness while keeping people emotionally at arm's length. The relationships I formed were shallow and doomed from the start. I'd find a pretty girl, we'd go on a couple of dates, get to fooling around in bed and over the next few weeks my insecurities would take hold. I'd get anxious, clingy, irritable. I drove so many of them away I got into the habit of cutting ties before much of a bond could form at all. I was in a stupor, riding on the high of being joined with someone for a night, before flitting off to the next.

As I grew older, I realized just how lonely that was. I tried to form bonds, to keep connections – and I couldn't.

It got to the point where any woman would do. I just didn't want to be alone anymore, even if I was with someone I didn't particularly love. Anything was better than being with myself.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** Not overly pleased with this one. Unsure of what needs tweaking. Also, things are getting busy. I'll have to drop the self-imposed challenge to make weekly updates. Will update when able.


	15. Chapter 8: December 3

**Chapter 8: December 3**

Mother arrives in short order and I'm petrified.

I'm not sure how my dad persuaded her to travel across the country on such short notice. She's been a slave to the lab in Mesa ever since we moved to Tucson. Whether by choice or by necessity, I can't say.

Either way, the quivering bouts of dread are rolling over me in mountainous waves. I knew this would be happening for two days now, I shouldn't be this – _freaked out._ It becomes all too clear, dauntingly, that this was a very bad idea.

I'm 27 and a pencil pusher at a job I don't care for. I don't have a house, I don't have a wife – I don't even have a girlfriend now. What I do have is a tiny studio apartment and a very nice car named Gypsy. I realize all I've done by bringing my mother up here is make her witness to how empty my life is and welcome her disappointment.

A very bad idea indeed.

Foot traffic in and out of the airport is a bit of a nightmare due to the time of year. Everyone is traveling. Thankfully Terminal C, gate 35 isn't terribly crowded. Most people out West prefer to stay there instead of paying bloated plane ticket prices.

She comes up the boarding ramp in a black overcoat that is both utilitarian and fashionable – and so very like her. Her hair's tied back messy again and the dark color of her winter wear doesn't make it look quite so dull in shade.

We hug, stiff and awkward like before.

I take a step back as we separate. How do you do this talking thing again? "I'm surprised you decided to come up."

She adjusts the carry on hanging from her shoulder. "Your father can be a real bully when he wants to be."

"So you had to be strong armed into flying here?" I ask, offering a smirk I don't feel.

Mother returns it. "I had to have a heart attack for you to see me."

That makes me flinch and my mouth argues a grimace. She might as well have slapped me again. "I... I was just..."

Her shoulders sag a bit, both hands clutching the strap of her carry on. "I know," she says, lips pursed. The blare of a hundred voices and PA announcements descends over us, vulnerable eyes unsure of where to look.

"Well, let's get going, then."

We make a trip down to baggage claim and go to meet Gypsy. Riding up along the Potomac, I ask her how her flight was. We converse in a curt manner all the way, while my hands grip the steering wheel far too tight. She doesn't comment when we pull into my apartment complex and I find it difficult to keep from staring at her to gauge a reaction. How could I have let my father do this?

Up at room 303, I jam my key into the slot, realizing too late that it's already unlocked. I don't know what to do when I see Marina by our – my – bed, packing a suitcase full to bursting with clothes. Her eyes find me stuck in the door way.

She nods, barely. "Hey."

"Hey." I shuffle my feet, glancing back to where my mother is waiting in the hall, missing her eyes. I turn back to Marina, trapped. Jumping out of the window across the way almost seems like a good idea.

"Just came for my clothes," Marina says.

I nod, rocking on my heels. "Right."

"I'll get everything else later."

"Sure."

Marina grabs her key from the kitchen counter, suitcase zipped up and rolling at her heels. Her steps slow, pausing a moment, gaze on the floor. She's waiting for me to say something, to stop her. My arm twitches, maybe to reach out, mouth open. No words come and I keep my hand at my side. There's nothing I can say, nothing I really want to say that wouldn't be a lie. I can't lie to her anymore. I can't pretend.

As she sets off down the hall, I know I've only driven the knife deeper with my silence. Right now, I can't feel anything. I might as well be dead inside.

"Everything alright?" mother asks.

Plaster smile. "Not really, no." I lead her in, being the gentlemen she expects me to be and relieving her of her luggage. Everything is as clean as I could make it, even rented a steam vacuum to clear up the carpets. Couldn't quite get rid of the warped linoleum in the kitchen. Maintenance has been indisposed since I called a day ago.

"Make yourself at home."

Mother meanders in, hands clasped languidly in front of her, neutral eyes taking everything in. What little there is. She only nods when I tell her she's got the bed and I'll be sleeping on the couch. It sounds so stupid when I say it. Not even a proper apartment with more than one damn room. I wish she'd say something, maybe even offer a condescending remark, anything but that guarded, hesitant expression.

Of all the days Marina could have shown up, it had to be today and without any kind of warning to boot. If I'd been caught in traffic just a few minutes later, I wouldn't have even had to see her. I guess hoping this weird little vacation would go even remotely smooth was just hoping for too much.

I step past her into the kitchen. "Coffee?"

"Cream and sugar, please." she moves to sit at the 'dining' table. I fix up a brew with the new coffee pot I bought yesterday. There's a french press in the cupboard collecting dust. Laziness tends to outweigh my desire for flavor. I wouldn't have the patience for it today anyway.

"Was that Marina?" mother asks, a softness to her tone.

I force down the condescending reply on the tip of my tongue. After a minute I settle for a simple, "Yes."

The coffee maker cracks and sputters for a while as we fiddle with our phones. Anything is better than just staring at a wall and not talking. I set her warm mug on the table, retreating back to the kitchen to pour my own.

After a few sips, she asks, "So, where are we going?"

I lean against the bartop, too nervous to sit anywhere in my own apartment. "Well, it's your first time in D.C. right? Thought we could stroll down National Mall today. Take a look at the Washington Monument."

She smirks. "A giant block of stone. How fun."

I grunt, turning back to the coffee pot. Has it always been this hard to joke with each other?

I take up a spot on the other side of the table, still standing. Thankfully mother doesn't ask anything more about Marina and tactfully comments that my apartment complex is "nice". The coffee goes cold before we finish and she isn't hungry yet, so it's as good a time as any to head out.

I'm waiting by the door, tugging my overcoat straight. It's been longer than a minute when I realize she's rooted in the kitchen, staring at something on the counter – next to the sink where I keep my pills. Dammit, I forgot to the put them away.

"Mom?"

My voice shakes her and she comes back to herself, stepping out of the kitchen, smile-too-big-to-be-real and all. "Yes, let's go."

The drive is short and parking is easy enough to find. We enter down Pennsylvania Ave, a wide corridor of hotels and corporate offices. The monument comes into view right away, a pillar of white spearing up into a pale blue sky, reigning supreme over an open land of withered trees and thick snows. It's not as bad as last year, when the snowfall came up to my knees.

"We never used to get snow," mother says as we trudge through to a clear path, "not unless you lived way up by the northern cap. It was always summer."

"I remember. Dad told me sometimes the soles of his shoes would melt on the asphalt." I've always tried to picture what a world without seasons might be like. I kind of lived in one for a while. Sometimes it got cold in Florida, but it was essentially always summer, even before and after Impacts. On the hotter days, the cicadas would scream and dad would shake his head, sighing. "It's going to rain tomorrow."

And so it would.

I've lived in D.C. for almost seven years now and I've never actually seen the national monument up close. It's hard to appreciate just how big the obelisk is until you're right up next to it. I crane my neck to look and instead of stone, I see a giant armored foot followed by a leg and a body. How big were they really?

Mother's brought a camera and there's a brief flash as she snaps a picture of the obelisk.

"What was he like?" I ask, trying to dispel thoughts of the shadow.

Her face quirks. "What?"

"Dad. Before..." I hesitate, chewing on my tongue, and deciding to follow one of the sidewalks arcing beyond the open courtyard. "You knew him when you were kids, right?"

She nods, snapping another picture as we pass. "When we were teenagers. He was quiet, shy..." she locks her eyes to mine, toying with a smile. "Distant."

I don't deign to offer a response. We walk by the motionless sentinel soldiers of the Korean War, cloaked in snow. The Lincoln Memorial lords over the strip, the reflecting pool empty for refurbishing.

"It may sound silly, but your father is... infuriatingly Japanese."

I stop, brow creased. "What do you mean?"

"He doesn't want to burden anyone," she says, nodding for me to keep walking. "Unloading that weight onto somebody else would be inconvenient and selfish. To him, at least."

"He burdens you," I say, quiet enough to at least not sound bitter.

"It's different with us."

"It always is."

Walking side-by-side, we settle into the dull roar of traffic and distant voices. Around us are memorials for a handful of wars, crafted with emotion and heartfelt care. The walkway starts to dip, gradually, and a black surface creeps up out of the ground, holding inscriptions marked in white. I read some of the names, considering how I would feel if my father's name was on the wall with the others. Would I miss him if I never met him? Never got the chance to know him? I grew up with the man and I still don't understand him. Would I have cherished the picture of the Tokyo-3 towers instead of hate it?

The polished black slabs are higher than I remember. They're too tall in fact, making it seem like we're in a deep pit.

"Do you think they should have a memorial for Tokyo-three?" the question sounds vague when I say it out loud. I don't know if anyone else in the world has ever commissioned a memorial for it. I guess by 'they' I mean America.

We've stopped where the obsidian walls meet at a point. Mother shrugs, mustering a wry face. "No one wants to remember. Not really."

"That's not what I asked."

"It doesn't matter." she shakes her head, taking a picture of the long walls and catching other visitors in the lens. "That part of my life is gone."

I don't know what to say to that. Has she always felt this way about it? Has she always been so determined to forget Third Impact and the Evas? I know that the family pictures we used to take were to bury those things. To phase them out of memory completely. Just like Tokyo-3. Nothing left but a gaping black hole in the ground.

I catch our reflection in the obsidian stone. It doesn't capture her age quite so thoroughly as a mirror might and I see a vision of a younger woman. She speaks to me and for a second I'm convinced I'm just going crazy.

"I... I haven't been a very good mother, have I?" she asks, eyes settled on a bouquet of flowers at the base of a slab. Her voice isn't small or weak like it was in the hospital, in fact it's hardly a question. To me it sounds more like an admission, a realization she's resigned herself to. Maybe that's only partly true. There is a bit of uncertainty, a shiver in the back of her throat. She's waiting for an answer, like Marina was – and I don't have any words.

I've wanted to hate her for a long time now. I told her once what I thought of her as a mother, never suspecting she believed it.

I can still see the broken look on her face when she found my pills. The smile she wore when we met again for the first time in eight years. I've hurt her again and all I can think about is how much I want to take back all the awful things I've said to her back home.

But I can't.

My arm shifts, knuckles brushing hers. Something pushes against me, fills me with doubt. I manage to take her hand in mine, weaving my fingers with hers. She squeezes back, but doesn't look away from the black wall etched with thousands of names. So we stand in this artificial depression, dragged down beneath the snow, and all I can do is stand here. While my mother tries to open her heart to me, all I can do is stand here with her hand in mine, wishing somehow I knew what to say.

Is this what healing is?

It doesn't feel like it.

The cold is turning my lips brittle and dry. My tongue passes over them and I let go of her hand, reaching for the other.

"Why don't we take a picture together?" I ask and she doesn't resist when I grab her camera, too thrown to do anything but look bewildered. The moment of reluctance bleeds out until she manages a nod, cautious. I put an arm around her, stretching the other out to catch us both in the shot. We smile and there's a flash of light. A Vietnam wall slides along on my mother's right, the Washington Monument rising up behind us.

We walk around for a little longer and eventually agree it's time to get some food. I take her down the street to Harry's, a little pub I like to frequent – decent prices. As soon as we sit down at a table, basking in the glowing warmth of the low lighting, our moods just – lift. The bitter, cold ice formed over the river has been broken, letting the water flow unhindered. We joke and we talk with an ease I didn't think possible. Mother complains about the food, claiming she never has been and never will be a cheap date. I promise to take her out to a proper restaurant tomorrow.

Which reminds me. "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"

"Somewhere not quite so depressing."

I chuckle. "Sure."

Later that evening, back at the apartment, I make good on my promise to Misato. Stepping out into the hallway, I dial for Home. Dad's probably a bit on edge anyway. Always has made a habit of worrying over mom.

He answers halfway through the first ring.

"Hey, dad."

"Kazuya," he says, hesitance failing to belie his surprise. "How's your mother?"

"Fine, fine. We walked around the Washington Monument today, took some pictures." I pace a bit, clawing around for anything else to mention. That's pretty much the gist of it, There's really nothing else for us to talk about, is there?

He must be thinking the same thing and asks, "Is she having a good time? Is she happy?"

I shrug. "I think so."

"Are you two fighting?"

"No... no, nothing like that. I guess we're just... learning how to walk again."

"You don't realize how close you are to her... how much she loves you," he says and I want to hang up on him. Who is he to tell me what I don't know? He doesn't even know _me_. I don't say anything, just lean against a wall and wait for him to continue. He has to know he's pushing it. "I've... well, we've been through a lot of rough patches, Kazuya. She's always been strong for it. That's just how she is. When it comes to you, though... she doesn't have any armor. Has a heart made of glass and it scares the hell out of her."

The idea of her, my Mother the Indomitable, being scared of something like that... it can't be true. It can't be real.

I know it is, though. I saw that glass heart only a week ago, in a hospital room where I nearly broke it. A part of me really wanted to. I just can't be that cold, not with her. She takes away my armor too – like she did today. How are we able to do that? How are we able to hurt each other so much and still be so close?

"We were flying out to meet the Third Pacific Fleet," dad says, jarring my brain stupid as it tries to play catch-up. It takes me a minute realize what he's talking about. I'd forgotten we were even on the phone. "It was transporting Unit-02 to New Yokosuka from Germany. We touched down on an aircraft carrier, uh... something Rainbow. I can't remember."

He pauses and I don't speak – if I do he might stop. Did I just hear him chuckle?

"She was wearing this yellow sundress. We were standing out on the flight deck and the wind picked up–" he starts laughing. My father. _Laughing_. "Damn near lifted it over her head. I swear your mom turned redder than her hair. Toji was right up in front of her too, full view. She slapped him around for his trouble."

Just the idea of her being happy, of getting to spend time with her son – It's making him laugh, making him smile. Making him joke. I can barely believe it. His mood swings used to get so bad, so unpredictable, I couldn't even acknowledge there was another side to his personality. Hearing it is... too many things to name. Where was this when I asked about it two days ago? Why couldn't he talk about it then? Why now?

"Kazuya?"

My courage flees.

"Yeah – yeah, I'm still here. Um... listen, someone's on the other line. I have to go."

I end the call before he can say anything, trying to convince myself that there was nothing else for us to talk about anyway.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** Just a memo to assure anyone who read this when it was first posted they're not going crazy. Made some minor edits to the last few lines. Wasn't really pleased with it before. Happier with this.


	16. Interlude VIII

**Interlude VIII**

There's a point in our lives where we have to make a decision.

A hazy precipice where we climb, struggling to reach the top to make that transition from children to adults. Laying out the stones that'll form the foundation for the rest of our lives.

I never reached the top. The climb was too long and the rocks thrown from on high too sharp. The boulders and stones crashed against me, bruising and bleeding. Despite that, I managed to scale those impossible heights. I was so close to the peak and the fog had grown heavy. I couldn't see the top anymore. I was lost.

I didn't know who I was or where I was going.

When I needed a hand to reach out and pull me up, to guide me, my mother stood there and watched me slip and fall. I thought that, of all people, she would understand the war and what it was doing to us.

She didn't understand anything.

I can't say it was entirely her fault. I could've hauled myself over the edge if I'd really tried. But I was so tired of everything. Letting go was just... easier.

As a child, I'd never seen into my parents room much, not even during the moves. I knew I had once shared their bed as a toddler, but couldn't have told you what it looked like in any of our homes. Not until I was around sixteen and both my parents were out of the house one afternoon.

I stand in front of their plain white door, maybe two inches thick. Taller and wider than any prison wall. Made only with the thickest reinforced concrete. Yet it's all too easy to grasp the handle and push it open.

The hinges creak. I take a step into my father's world. The air smells undeniably like his cologne, rich sea salt winds that make me think of the ocean.

Newspaper articles and old photos with incoherent scribbles are tacked up to a corner of the wall, right next to an office desk and powered down computer. My father is always writing on that thing. I can't pick up a book without thinking of him, even though I've never read any of his stories or whatever it is he writes. I don't think he's ever published anything.

The room itself is immaculate, conservative. The bed is made without a wrinkle, carpet fresh and warm under my feet. A few contemporary paintings decorate the walls. It's almost intentionally mundane, done to counteract that picture-laden corner bleeding over the sunflower yellow paint, a frenzied brain caught in a loop. The air around it is oppressive, heated – angry. It screams _conspiracy._

My face scrunches, trying to decipher this alien language disguised as Japanese. Half of the articles are in English, some even look like official reports. None of it makes sense – it's all just garbled numbers, which I think are dates, and illegible notes. Some lines blur over and over until they devolve into meaningless gibberish, painted like graffiti over the images of Old Japan and buildings with foreign names.

My father hid from the world and from the war here, or so I used to think. The truth was much different. He was stuck on those islands. Always standing on their shores. A POW destined never to come home. My mother couldn't forget the war, even if she wanted to like she claims. In her arms at night she held a living, breathing reminder of it day by day. A scar that often split open anew and with a vengeance.

The wall burns at me with its intensity and I stumble away from that stained corner. _Wait_ , something calls to me, catches my eye, sitting on the dresser facing my mother's side of the bed. The sheen is dull, even under the light coming in through the window. An oval mirror faces me as I approach, two of the small things resting in front of it. Red bulbs with hard black lines cutting through them.

I reach out, plucking one up in my fingers.

"What are you doing?"

I jump and it clatters over the dresser and to the floor. My father stands in the doorway.

"Nothing," I say, donning a glare to counter his unreadable expression. After a moment, he nods to the hall, stepping aside so I can hurry out. I didn't even hear the front door open.

At the stairs, I stop on the first step, watching my mother swipe through her phone on the couch.

"Where'd you go?"

She sighs, not even turning around to look at me. "To convince your teachers yet again that you're not a waste of a student. It gets harder to lie about every time I go."

Hard lines carve at my face and I bark a laugh. " _You_ finding it hard to bullshit someone?" I ask, knowing how terribly prodding this fire will end. She just had to go for another stupid barb instead of just answering the question. If she wants a fight, I'll give her one.

She doesn't respond, not even a glare, just keeps poking at her phone. I huff, scowl not quite fading as I make it upstairs to my room.

Seven Christmas' ago, dad got me a music player and some earbuds to go with it. Holding it under some contempt, I came to appreciate the gift later and how easily it let me block everything out.

Minutes tick by, the music almost taking me away when my mother decides to invite herself in. Normally she'd at least knock first, that's how I know this is serious.

I yank the earbuds out as she leans against my door frame, eyes tired, but hard.

"What?" I snap.

She shrugs, unimpressed. "Did you even look at any colleges today?" she asks, slight frown telling me she already knows the answer.

"Got busy. Didn't have time."

"That's it? Just got busy?" she laughs the last part and it's hollow, tweaking my temper. She sees it too, knows just how to twist her words. Her stance shifts and she lets out a sigh, so tired of it all. "You can't get into a decent college with your grades anyway. What do you plan to do when you graduate?"

I know exactly what she's doing and I'm not going to fall for it. I've fought with her too many times about this to be goaded into another sparing match. Beneath the skin I'm shaking. Our fights are explosive, but these arguments, the kind where she brings up school and the future – we might as well be given knives to stab each other with.

"I don't know," I say, hoping – praying – that she gives up on this one.

To give up would mean defeat and that is not something my mother ever concedes. "I guess you're just going to work some dead end job for minimum wage the rest of your life, huh?"

"I can still go to college."

She laughs, a real one this time. "What, some underfunded community college?"

I fumble, bite my lower lip and make a dedicated lunge with my imaginary weapon. "We can't all be child prodigies bound for Heidelberg."

"You're right," she parries, throwing off my guard. "I had to work to get into Heidelberg at eleven. I guess I should just take you out of school then so you can start applying for some shitty fast food job and move out. You obviously don't care where the hell you end up, why should I?" a sledgehammer in place of a knife, cracking bones and pressing against my lungs.

I won't break. "I do care, it's just–"

"Why did I waste all this time with advanced classes, paying extra for the magnet schools, if you were just going to waste it?" she barks, knocking me down all too easily. She has me pinned and she knows it.

The walls are ringing, my blood pulsing with a need to escape. There's nowhere to run. "I don't know. I'll figure it out."

"No." fury draws at her, a cord drawn taut over the years snapping. "No, there is no figuring it out. You decide now. I'm not playing these games anymore."

"I'm not playing games either! I just have to – consider all my options."

"Show me!" she shouts, her voice shaking like my body is. "Show me all of these other options you have! Let me guess, you're going to head to ASU and fuck off for two years so you can snag a manager position at a telecom company, right?"

It hits exactly where she wants it too, gutting me, yanking a flinch from my shoulders. Behind her I see a shadow against the light, my father drawn upstairs by us. He stands behind her, doesn't touch her, doesn't say anything, just stares at me with woeful eyes. I clamp my mouth shut, chew on my tongue, all too exposed now that he's here watching and listening. I don't know how to fight now. There's two of them and I can't trust which side my father will take, if any. He'll probably just go back to his room and disappear.

 _Coward._

"What happened?" mother presses, voice low, every word a bullet that rips into me. "You had some hardass shit to say to me down stairs, why so quiet now? I'm done, Kazuya... you have to figure out where the hell you're going in life or you have to find a new home. I'm not going to let my son sit in his room until he's in his thirties so he can continue to amount to _nothing_ for the rest of his life."

I look at the floor, quivering so hard I have to squeeze my fingers tight to make it stop. I can't take it anymore, but I have to. _I have to_.

 _What do I do?_

"That's not fair," I say, voice wavering.

"That's life. Get used to it. What's it going to be?"

 _What do I do?_

It begins as a tremble, the wounds, even the scabbed over scars, peel open to spill everything over the edges.

"I don't... I don't _know_." a frown cracks at my mask, choking me the more I try to fight it back, a heat building behind my eyes. A possession sweeps over me, guiding my sight up to her, perhaps in some innate attempt to seek solace. A world of weight presses down on me, the battles of the Angel War, the burden to meet her expectations – I'm not strong enough now. I need help.

"I just..."

 _Someone help me_.

Was my face so pleading when I looked at her? Hopeful she might offer kind, healing words? Lend me relief from a bitter front, as mothers are supposed to? She stands there, so very resolute in posture – unshakable, like those northern eyes of hers. The air holds its breath, her answer staring at me through cloudy irises.

Without uttering a word, in the way her chin lifts, in the way her jaw tenses, she answers –

 _No_.

Ever since I was six, I'd been trying to hold the tears in. Be the grown up she expected me to be. Real adults didn't cry. Proper people who weren't twisted up on the inside didn't cry. I wouldn't be like my father.

I would never be like him.

A sob shatters me and I pinch my eyes, as if that will somehow stem the flow of tears. I can see her through blurred vision, arms crossed, holding herself back as I fall apart. A hand covers my face because I can't bear the weight of her gaze anymore, grasping for some moment of privacy in this broken thing named Kazuya. If the pounding frag bursts in my throat weren't drawing such bawling, tear streaked whimpers, I'd tell her how much I hate her, I'd scream at her. _I hate you. I hate you I hate you_ –

A body and a warmth presses itself on the bed next to me, my father's arm hugging around my back. "It's alright... I'm here, son. I'm right here. You're okay."

He hugs me close, hand rubbing my shoulder and voice full of a tenderness I don't recognize. "It's alright. I'm here."

At the time, it just made me cry harder.

When I needed her most – my mother abandoned me and the man I hated tried to comfort me and salvage my pride, best he could.

That was the moment I became well and truly lost.


	17. Chapter 9: December 4

**Chapter 9: December 4**

I laid wide awake last night, concentrating on my mother's quiet breathing and wondering if her dreams would be visited by the Eva. She still takes sleeping pills. Lying in the dark, listening to her occasionally rustling the sheets or mumbling, is more soothing than any of my dreams might have been. Comforting, in a way, knowing that after so long she's able to have at least one peaceful night of rest.

I don't feel very tired when morning creeps over the world. I'm sure it'll hit me later in the day, but for now the smell of steaming coffee is tantalizing and it's shaping up to be a relatively cloudless and bright day. Mother wakes around 6, an early riser. I try to give her some privacy, throwing a couple of eggs in the pan and some bread in the toaster for myself. I'm sure she considers her mornings to be undignified – the almost immediate retreat to my bathroom, where she stays for a good half hour, tells me as much. She'd rather be freshened up in front of her son than be seen at all.

I huff, holding onto the thought, wishing I had shown such care when I went to see her. _Wishing gets you no where_. I'm clean shaven and fresh and it's her birthday today. Happy Rotational Survival Day, Pip would say.

Like the rising sun outside, even my mother has a little more brightness to her as she steps out of the restroom, buttoning the cuffs of her pale yellow shirt. She stands next to me, our elbows not quite touching. I ask her if she wants any, to which she only shakes her head, hands resting on the counter next to the stove. The eggs sizzle, over easy.

"What medication do they have you on?" She asks and I see she's staring at spot I keep my pills. It's barren now. I hid the bottles as soon as we got back yesterday.

I take a big breath and puff it out. "Just anti-depressants at first. Graduated to anti-anxiety, anti-nightmare and mood-stabilizers. The works."

She doesn't make anything of my light tone. "I didn't see any anxiety meds."

"I need to get a new prescription," I say with a shrug, avoiding her eyes. 'I emptied the bottle hoping to OD' doesn't have quite the same ring to it. In truth, I won't be able to refill it for another week. Go me.

And like that the space between us is strained again. Or maybe my system is protesting against a lack of blissful chemical sedation. Hard to tell. Have I always been this jittery or is it just the coffee? Even as we head down the road towards D.C., I find my bouncing nerves are only mitigated by how relaxed my mother is today. She was wound like a spring yesterday and this morning there's a shadow of a smile hovering at the corners of her mouth, as though it might burst free at any moment.

After parking, we head down Pennsylvania Ave again and she hooks her arm through mine, hanging onto it as we walk.

"Where to?" she asks.

I guess she isn't pissed after all. How is it she knows me so well but I can't read her at all? Must be a mom thing.

"I think it's a nice day to spend inside staring at paintings."

That smile breaks free and she nods. I may not be able to predict my mother's moods, but I have a feeling it doesn't really matter where we go or what we do today. So long as she gets to walk with her arm hooked through mine, she'll be content.

We can see the Capitol building down the strip. Most of the year you can only spot the statue-crested dome spearing through the bushy heads of trees. Across from us is the pillared entrance to the National Gallery of Art. A statue of the Roman god Mercury hails us to greet him as we enter, standing atop his fountain in the middle of a rotunda guarded by columns of malachite marble. The gallery isn't terribly busy for the time of day. A few local artists have set up shop here and there, doing their best to mimic the work of the old masters.

We wander through the west wing, quirking our heads at the more abstract pieces imbued with symbolic meaning that only the artist seems to know. The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. We chuckle a bit at the dramatized figures. Next to it, a woman with red hair looks at us from where she sits by the railway, a puppy fast asleep in her lap. The painting down the hall makes me stop where I stand, my legs making long strides to bring me right up close a second later. Even after staring for a long minute, trying to figure out what in particular about this works calls to me, I find I still can't move away.

The woman is up on a hill of green, shimmering yellow under the light of the sun, blue sky and fluffy clouds at her back. The light is against her so that she casts a shadow down the hill. Next to her is a boy, but he stands further beyond the tall grass. Both of them are looking at me, waiting – _are you_ _coming?_ They seem to ask.

I want nothing more than to be on that hill with them under the warmth of the sun. Up there in the light, where everyone will be able to see me.

The thought is as elating as it is frightening.

I don't want them to see the real me – the one who can't love anybody right. The one who had once wished his dad would kill himself. The one who tried to make his mother feel lower than dirt. People will see that part of me and they will turn away, disgusted.

The other kids in school, back when I was still just quirky instead of the strange not-right-in-the-head Japanese boy, would ask, "If you could have any super power, what would it be?"

"I'd want to be invisible."

They traded quizzical looks, before one asked, "Why?"

Why indeed? Why wouldn't I want to be super strong or fast or be able to shoot laser beams from my eyes? If I was invisible, no one could hurt me. You can't hate what you can't see, right? If no one knows you exist, no one can yell at you or make you feel unwanted.

In this painting, the father and husband, is missing. He's the painter, giving us a glimpse into the light of his life.

 _Are you coming?_

"I like this one better," mother says, gesturing to the one in front of her on my right. It's done in the same impressionistic wisps of color. A man, with his back to us, paints under the shade of a yellow parasol. On his left is a woman in blue, collecting flowers? Roses? The color is indecisive, a gnarled oak tree rising between the man and woman. A simple, quiet moment.

Were things ever that peaceful for my parents? Were they ever that at ease with each other? Does she gravitate towards it because it speaks to her inner wants? Or does it represent a moment of rest she was once able to grasp? Just one day in too many years to breathe?

 _Is that your truth? Did I take your chance to breathe away?_

We spent more time there than I thought either of us would have cared for. The new modern art building next to it takes significantly less time to browse through. The sun has just begun the second half of its arc through the sky when we decide to eat. The Old Ebbitt Grill is heavy with that rustic Victorian era charm. White, design imprinted table cloths, velvet seats, intricately crafted gold painted lamp necks that give off a dull glow. It isn't the most expensive place, but it isn't cheap either.

Seated at a booth lined with dark green shrubbery, we talk about her work with the neurology department at Mesa. It's a privately funded lab, working just like thousands of others to find new medical approaches to mental disorders – or just figure out how it all works to begin with. I can't say what that and Metaphysics have in common for her to intermingle the two. The Soul and Mind are separate but the same? I listen to her rant, sensing how much it infuriates her that after centuries we know so much about the human brain, but so very little at the same time. She's been spending the past thirteen years trying to understand how people's minds actually work and to her own admittance has little to show for it.

I can sympathize.

Then the moment I've been dreading since she arrived in Washington drops on the table with all the weight of a semi-truck.

"How's the CIA?" she asks, going out of her way to make the question sound innocent.

I shrug. "Not much to talk about. Same paperwork, different salary." It's more of a lie than it was before. Mother hums, fork making circles in her trout parmesan. I'm not really bound as much by secrecy. I can talk about the stuff that isn't classified anymore. I doubt she'd really care to listen.

"Do you still think it was wrong of me to join the CIA?" I ask, trying to sound casual, as if her answer doesn't hold such incredible weight.

Her expression is neutral. "It never mattered to you before."

I lean forward, fingering the thin stem of my wine glass. I could probably snap it with my thumb with the right amount of pressure. "It's always mattered."

It's something I thought I'd never admit to anyone, least of all her. That was the last, fragile link between us to break. I can still feel that rush of adrenaline I got after telling her off – what a catharsis it was to get her to feel something. It's one of the brain's many tricks. Played me like a fool, when all I really wanted was–

"You're very intelligent, Kazuya," she finally says, my eyes darting up before I can think to put my mask back on. She leans forward and meets them. "I know all mothers say that about their kids, but in your case it's actually true... I wasn't upset that you didn't want to go into Metaphysics like me. You were putting that thick," she pokes my forehead, "brilliant head of yours to waste. I thought I had to be tough on you to get you to see that."

A fierce sense of pride fills me, fighting against our old battle scars. This one I'll take to my grave, but that harsh treatment did work, in a way. I'll never agree that it was properly handled and that particular betrayal will always leave buried shrapnel in my heart. I can, at the very least, admit that it got me to do something.

What happened afterwards... there's still too much roiled up for me to face yet.

"Would it make you happy if I went to school again?"

She huffs. "Would it make _you_ happy?"

I can't say. I've never really known what I wanted to do with my life. I've just taken strides with the crowds, walking with them in what I thought were steps towards social acceptance. If I did things other people did, I would be normal, right?

"I took a children's psychology course my first year. I just wanted some easy credits, but... I ended up really liking it. I don't know, maybe I could teach something like that one day."

She leans her cheek on a propped up hand – and her smile is so completely full of love. "You are such a difficult boy."

"I guess I take after my mother."

I didn't think it was possible, but her smile grows. "Yeah, I guess you do."

It's a comfortable drive home and I spend it replaying that glowing smile over and over. Thankfully, Marina hasn't come by again, still maintaining radio silence. I was expecting this to be a long, painful, frustrating process. She's only ever been a vindictive kind of woman for the year and a half I've known her. This other Marina is so determined to phase me out of memory that she'd rather sneak into my apartment when she thinks I'm not home than risk facing me again.

I never expected that to sting quite so much.

By the bed, mother pulls something square and brown out of her suitcase, sitting down with it on the couch.

"What's that?"

"I was digging around the attic the other day – and I found this." In her lap she holds a thick, synthetic leatherbound book.

I can't help but laugh. "You brought a photo album?"

"Twenty-twenty-seven to twenty-thirty-two." she pats the spot beside her, giddy.

"Come on, I don't want to look at those."

She makes a slight pout. "But it's my birthday."

I roll my eyes, sitting down anyway and she smirks, triumphant. She has two other albums at home that cover the same years. I'm at least curious as to why she considers this one particularly special. She starts flipping through, lips stretching into that wide smile I saw at dinner. I'm just a baby in most of them, wide-eyed, curious. First one I see is her in the hospital, holding a newborn me in her arms. She looks awful, but her expression is soft and vibrant. Rich with new life.

The pictures stretch on, page by page, telling a story – one I only remember in bits and pieces.

"You were a pretty happy kid," mom says, revisiting those beaches in Panama, letting memories of more care free times wash over her.

"Look," she says, a slim finger touching one of the pictures. "You two were best friends."

We're in a convertible and I take a moment to marvel at how young my father is, how I hardly recognize him and that wide smile. I'm maybe three, sitting between his legs and pretending I'm steering.

In another, he's on his back balancing me up on his feet, my arms out like superman. Then my first day of school back in Panama, the sun is just peaking over the buildings as we walk to the drop off. He's got my hand in his, smiling down at me. One time mom found us both passed out on the couch, with me fast asleep in the crook of his arm. Afternoon spills in through the windows, casting us in warm hues.

I can see it. Those captured moments are so full of truth and light. Innocence. This is how my mother wants to spend her birthday: sharing her happy memories with me.

I spot something then, touching the pages. "Where'd that come from?"

One shot has me in the bathtub, a big desert camo helmet swallowing my head, tipping forward so all the camera can see is my big grin.

Mother blinks and shakes her head. "You used to like collecting old combat gear. Stay out on the beaches all day playing war. One day your dad bought you this Army helmet he found at a thrift store. You ate with it, slept with it, _bathed_ with it. I couldn't get you to take the damn thing off. Had to fight with you to leave it home for school."

I laugh, picturing her chasing me through the house for it. "Really?"

"Mm-hm."

Misato comes to me in a blur, dressed in uniform? I don't know, she's got me wearing her helmet, sitting me in her lap and smiling. We must be visiting her at the base. _"Mommy and daddy were soldiers, too, Kazuya,"_ she says. I don't remember why or how we came to it, but I know she was proud when she said it. So I was proud too.

Mother points again. "Look, see? My little soldier." she'd snapped a picture of me in that old Gulf War helmet, eyes peaking over the mound of dirt from the fox hole I'd dug out, a toy rifle in my hands.

I wanted to be a soldier.

Just like my parents.

Except they weren't those kinds of soldiers and war wasn't at all like I thought it would be.

My age doesn't change much as the book goes on and I'm only five before we reach the end. Towards the back she has some later photos I assume there wasn't any other place for in the albums. One of them is a picture of her with Grandfather Langley. It's in our old yard at Flagstaff and he's in uniform. They're both as stiff as boards, a good few inches separating them, his hand touching her back in a mechanical gesture of closeness. Neither of them wears much of a smile.

A ringtone chirps, mother's cell phone buzzing. Setting the album on the coffee table, she crosses the room and answers it, while I attempt to avoid being nosy and flip through the book again. I stop when she glances back at me, her posture tensing. Her voice is hushed, a worry I've heard before reaching me from that corner.

My heart picks up, sensing what's happening before I can. It's my father on the other end of that line, I know, a chill running through my bones. Another glance and this time it's written all over her face. He's having an episode. I know it. I can feel it in creeping tugs of dread. Long minutes tick by and she's starting to sound desperate.

Mother marches back to me. "Talk to him, please," she says, holding the phone out. "He won't listen to me. He's not making any sense, please just talk to him."

My eyes take in the phone, then dart back up to her and I like to think the betrayal I feel doesn't reach my face. It must have, because she pulls her hand away, about to bring the phone to her ear again. I stand and snatch it in the same movement, showing her my back as the phone touches my ear. I can't stand to see her look so scared.

"Dad?" I ask, bracing myself for the tide of cursing and yelling that's sure to follow. It doesn't, but I flinch as his panic spills over the line. He's ranting. "It wasn't me," he says, repeating it over and over. He says that he never meant to hurt anybody. He didn't want to hurt anybody. He didn't know what he was doing. A headache starts to crack against my skull.

I hold back a sigh. "Calm down, dad. What are you talking about?" I can only wonder what he must be seeing right now. What apparition of me is accusing him.

"I didn't– I didn't really want to kill all those people, Kazuya. I've done some terrible things, but I didn't really want everyone to die. It wasn't me, it wasn't me..."

 _It was the Eva_.

I don't know what he could possibly mean. Could he be talking about Third Impact? That was Gendo Ikari, wasn't it? That's what all the books and lessons said. Why would it be my father? How could it be him?

Because the Evas ended the world, didn't they? I've known all along – that the truth is my father lost control and hurt people with it. That's what all those history texts said about the Evas. I took those half-remembered insights and turned them into an excuse to hate him further. He hurt us all the time, why wouldn't I believe he'd be capable of such a terrible thing?

So why am I standing here wanting to believe otherwise? He's talking like he's been put before judge and jury. As if I'm trying to convict him for genocide, like those trials all those years ago.

I don't know what to do.

I swallow, forcing down that wreck called Kazuya, still sixteen and crying in his room. "It's okay, dad... I'm here."

What else can I do?

"I didn't mean to." His voice is pleading, on the verge of crumbling. "I didn't, I didn't..."

"I know, dad. I know you didn't."

"I never wanted to kill anybody. You believe me... don't you?"

Right now, what I have to say is the only thing he cares about. There's nothing more important. I realize in this moment my father has given me the power to break him. To take his shattered self and crush him completely. I've dreamed of that. What I would say, how I would hurt him. Yet here he is, asking for my help, begging. He needs me... and that pull is too strong to shake free of.

I can't run away anymore.

"Of course I do," I say, just more than a whisper, the words foreign as they roll off my tongue. This time I'm only answered by silence. "I know you didn't mean to... do what you did. I know you wouldn't kill anybody... I know you wouldn't hurt anybody. It's okay, dad."

What follows is a long, torturous descent into quiet. I can hear the neighbors kids thumping around upstairs. My heart starts pounding in my ears. When he speaks, I can hear him as if he were standing right next to me.

"I don't believe you."

The receiver clicks, a low tone chirping over the dead line. I shut the phone off, turning back to my mother who has her arms wrapped around herself. My brain can't quite process what's just happened, why it happened. For a second I'm able to really see her, what she's thinking. _I shouldn't have left him. I knew I shouldn't have left him._ I want to tell her it's not her fault. Dad thought he could handle himself for a few days, that's all. It's not your fault.

Neither of us says a word.

We end up on the couch again, a good foot between us while she sifts through the photo album, not really seeing any of the pictures.

"Tomorrow we'll have been married for thirty-five years," she says, at last filling the long silence.

I find myself staring at her ring. "You got married on December fifth?"

"Yeah. Jerry settlement in Idaho."

That catches me by surprise. I always knew they were stuck in the camps like most other Japs at some point. It seems like a pretty crummy place to be married. I decide not to ask her about it.

"No anniversary plans?"

She shakes her head. "We've never really celebrated it like that."

"So... it's not special to you?"

By the way she looks at me, like I'm speaking another language, I know I've missed something, misinterpreted. She takes a moment to answer, turning back to the album.

"We're together," she says, tracing the outline of a photo with all three of us, taken selfie-style. "That's enough."

She decides to leave a day early. Sets up a flight for the next morning. I'm... frustrated with her, to say the least. Frustrated with my father for taking this from her, from us. Tonight was a cruel reminder of how close the war really is, and that we'll never be able to get away from it.

I lie awake again that night, my eyes struggling to adjust to the dark after turning off the lights. Her back is to me and I can hear that she's awake too. My father's words echo off the walls. I'd betrayed him today afterall. He'd known I didn't really believe what I'd said. I was just lying. I'd betrayed him anyway.

I hadn't meant to this time.

"Mom... what happened, during the Siege?" I ask, the blackness, where I can't see her face, both giving me courage and blanketing me with doubt. I wait long, vein trembling minutes for an answer. Maybe she _has_ fallen asleep.

"There was a battle," she says, revealing a hollow edge I've never heard before. My mother without the walls.

"And I lost."


	18. Interlude IX

**Interlude IX**

Misato had drank too much.

It was a rarer occurrence than one might think, considering the amount of alcohol she consumed on a daily basis. These were the times when I kept quiet and just sat with her as she became inconsolably sad. No longer the bubbly Aunt, or even the Colonel. The drinks let that buried depression tug down at her and snare her in the muck and mire, rising to snuff out the light in her eyes.

"I sent him out there. What else could I do?" she had said, on this night where she had drank too much, listless on the couch. "What else could I do?"

I didn't have any answers for her. I just listened, like she listened for me. This time was different, though. There were tears welling in her eyes, a sorrow not born of past pains, but rather a longing. So deep and profound it hurt just to look at.

"I sent him out to fight," she went on, reaching for the half finished beer on the floor and knocking it over instead. "I told him to come back to me."

Her knees draw up. "He never did. That boy I sent down to the cages... he never did come back."

I used to wonder who 'that boy' was. Who was the boy she sent to war that never came back? Another pilot, like my dad? She didn't have any sons, none that I knew of. No nephews. Really, there was only one boy she could've been talking about.

It hadn't quite clicked until I saw my father's room and that black corner. He'd been split apart, scattered to bits and pieces that were left behind in the sand, ghosts left to haunt empty suburbia. A man came back, but a boy had died somewhere out there beyond the sea.

Even Misato was still touched by the Eva's long shadow.

I hated them.

The night when I was sixteen and shattered made me realize the only way to escape my parents and the war was to, funnily enough, do exactly what my mother wanted. I applied myself at school again, cleaned up my grades, managed to scrounge together a good GPA out of it. I scoured colleges all along the east coast, filling out forms for every scholarship I could get my hands on. There was a nice beefy one for children of Japanese refugees, instated as some sort of half-assed apology, courtesy of the U.S. Government. Thanks Sam.

The CIA was an exciting avenue. Less work than the military and I could travel the world, go to places on missions that affected global policy making. The para-military training we went through during recruitment was grueling, the funniest part being that none of us ever used it again. Officers work through their agents. Operators, they're called. Everyday people in foreign countries recruited to serve as intelligence gatherers. It's actually pretty rare for any Officer to leave their office nowadays.

I didn't know that at the time and it seemed far more noble than being a Metaphysics professor like my mother, which she had secretly been grooming me for since grade school. Always managed to insert talk about MIT into our conversations. She was delighted, of course, I had dedicated myself to doing so well in school again. _I've gotten through to him_. She was surely thinking. _I've won_.

She realized soon enough that something different was happening when I refused to speak to her at dinner, or told her I was too busy studying when she wanted to take me out somewhere – just trying to spend time with me. She'd broken my walls. I was never going to forgive her for that, taking a cruel pleasure from the indignant looks I got whenever I refused her offers for dinner or a movie.

But you don't ignore Professor Asuka Langley Soryu. If anything, she ignores you. When she demands your attention, you give it. When she's done with you, you shut up and be thankful for what you got. Her advances were surprisingly subtle at first, as though she were probing my defenses. A shrewd tactician if nothing else. She wanted to throttle me for answers, but was hesitant her meddling might cause my renewed vigor towards education to drop. I maintained a strict gag-order. We were on even grounds now and she didn't know me or how to approach me anymore. I didn't let her. I wouldn't let her make use of that weakness again.

Our cold war came to an end the day after my nineteenth birthday. I'd gone over to a friend's to get wasted for the night. They weren't even people I liked very much, just some jocks that had once said I was a "cool dude" for starting a fight back in middle school. I just didn't want to be home on my birthday.

I came back just after noon. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, hands folded over an open letter. From where I was standing I could see part of a college crest.

"I've been patient," she says, expression carved from stone. "I've given you your space. But I'm not paying for you to go to Berkeley."

I cross my arms. "That's fine. You can keep your money. I've got all the scholarships I need."

"To do what?" She snaps and I notice her hands tense.

Inwardly, I smile. "Get a good higher education – then I'll be off to join the CIA."

And like that I've won. She was going to fight but she's got no leverage. Not anymore. I made sure of that. There's something else there when she leans her head against splayed fingers, shaking her head.

"I'm so disappointed in you, Kazuya," she says, quietly, pursing her lips as something repressed and beaten comes to the surface.

"No," I murmur, my composure falling completely, scalding heat bleeding over my cheeks. "No, you don't get to be disappointed in me. That would imply you gave a damn to begin with. You're just upset that you can't control me, that I won't be your obedient little doll. I don't want to be a Metaphysics professor. I don't want to be like you. I'd rather be the fucking garbage man than some worthless professor like you."

There's hard, skin-splitting force behind her hand as she slaps me. It rings louder than any gunshot and has me taking a staggering step back. She'd never hit me before, not even during our nastier fights. I can taste blood from where my teeth have cut into my cheek. A hand swipes at my lips, collecting globules of crimson that spill down my fingers.

"This is who you are," I say, low and even so the shiver in my chest doesn't rise to my voice. I turn my hand out so she can see. "You're a horrible person and I hate you."

My hand curls into a fist, spreading the blood into my palm. I cling to that, clutch it tight, my last lifeline to the world. The only thing that brings me any comfort and soothes my festering wounds.

"I **hate** you."

I remember her hands were curled in tight fists and she was trembling. I thought it was because she was angry. Now, I know it was something else entirely. I'd ripped her open like the Eva had – and she didn't want me to see just how deep the tear went.

Five days later, I'm all packed and ready to leave. Mother has been a specter of clacking heels and bouncing red hair. Gets up early and returns so late I don't see her. I've caught her around the house a handful of times and I'm not acknowledged in the slightest. It's like I don't exist anymore.

She's doing that today too. I know she has off from work but she's holed up in her room. She won't see me. I know it's irrational for that to bother me so much.

"You won't say goodbye to her?" dad asks from down the hall, giving me a wide berth. He's not even looking at me as I gather my things by the door, just stares low at the wall.

That draws out a hollow laugh, a twisted smile. "Like she cares. She's probably glad to get rid of me. I'm just a burden, after all." I sneer the last part, knowing I'm close enough to their room for her to hear me.

"You can't understand," he says, taking away my petty triumph. I pause by my suitcase, glaring up at him. "You'll never understand."

It isn't said with anger, more a tone of pity, even regret, which just makes it worse. Demeaning. He was talking about my mother of course. In the moment, I was too blinded to see that.

"I don't _want_ to understand you," I say, hauling up the few belongings I've decided to bring. I was young. Too young and too angry. The suitcase zips up, everything double and triple checked.

Dad takes a few hesitant steps closer. "Your room will still be here."

"Why? Get rid of that stuff. I'm not coming back."

He clamps his mouth shut, nothing left to say. What the hell did he expect? Why does he care all of a sudden?

 _"I'm here son. I'm right here. You're okay."_

I will him to keep his feet where they are. I don't want him to try and hug me. I don't want him anywhere near me. Not so long as I live. He stays put and out of the corner of my eye I find that plaque with the Tokyo-3 towers.

"This picture is a lie," I say, a flash of anger taking me, reaching my hand out to tear that frame off the wall. "Just like this family."

I toss it, gravity doing the rest and sending glass and wood splintering across the hallway. I fling the front door open, stepping out into the bright, warm noon light. I'm finally leaving. I'm free. I march down that driveway, taking strength from my resolve and my determination.

I'm free.

A weight lifting off my shoulders as I walked, leaving that dark house behind, I looked back, just once. The door was still open, where my father stood staring at the broken picture gathered up in his hands.

 _"That boy never did come back."_


	19. Chapter 10: December 5

**Chapter 10: December 5**

Nobody wins in a war.

Least of all the soldiers who are sent to fight it.

I glance at my mother's wrist as she bends to set her carry on down. The wrist with the long white scar.

I tried counting all of them once. Most of those faded marks intersect, blurring together into strips of bleached skin. Thirty-five. Not including the razor thin incisions at her wrists. The Angel War, in three weeks time, will have come to an end forty years ago. She'll never tell me what happened, that much I'll have to accept. She won't lie to me like when I was younger, but it will always be another part of her only my father knows. He was right. I'll never understand.

Would it really bring me any peace if I could comprehend it? Do I really want to know how that final battle played out? There are other ways to find the answers I want. I'm just not sure if I want to know what could drive someone as seemingly strong-willed as my mother to hurt herself.

 _"There was a battle... and I lost."_

The temp dropped hard last night and the snowfall is still coming down in thick sheets. The roads are absolute chaos. Snow trucks struggle to push all of it clear, causing blockages in traffic all along the highways, made all the worse by reduced speed limits and vigilant state troopers. It's going to take a lot of time and road-side bullying to get back home.

For now, we're in the crowded shelter of Reagan airport. I hug my mother this time, grip her tight. So she knows for sure that I really do love her. I have to let her know, before she goes, that at least I still care about her.

"Give Misato my best," I say as we part.

Mother huffs. "Of course. You know, she always talks about how the bar just isn't the same without you starting fights over pool."

I muster a small smile, waiting for one of us to say something over the din of the airport. I don't know if we accomplished much of anything with this trip. I don't know if we've healed. But then you don't fix scars, do you?

"Listen..." Mother says, serious – piercing me with that level stare of hers. "A lot happened back when I was a pilot. That's not the reason I never talked about it," she pauses to search my face, as if taking me in for the first time, brand new to her world all over again. Her gaze strays from mine and she brushes flecks of snow from my shoulders. "I just found something else to be proud of."

She picks up her carry on and we don't hug again, saying quiet goodbyes instead. I approach the big floor-to-ceiling windows by the terminal, where I watch her plane for the next hour as it loads up, pulls away and rolls out onto the tarmac.

Found something else to be proud of. That's only a half truth.

My mother didn't want to remember her time in the war, still doesn't want to. I think of that photo album again and on some level, I feel like I can understand, seeing her as I have this past week. Since the war and since the camps, she just wanted to make new, happy memories with me and my dad. All the ugliness in her past just wasn't important when she had us.

Things turned out pretty ugly anyway, didn't they?

At home, I decide to hop on the net and end up staring at the searchbar for what feels like ages. My fingers tap the keys but don't input anything, an intent lurking somewhere behind those joints. My father's breakdown over the phone yesterday is still fresh. Still boils in my stomach. Fear. Too smothering and heavy. The war and its entirety is open to me here.

I have to look. I can't shut it away anymore. I have to at least try to come to terms with it. These past few days have had my brain doing flips, and these new, conflicted feelings towards my father and my childhood haven't helped. If I don't try to get past this, I'll just be stuck in the same place I've always been.

I start by looking up the ship my father mentioned, the USS _Rainbow_.

The first result is an old battleship. Commissioned in 1901 and decommed in 1925. Definitely not the right one. Under it is a picture of the _John C. Stennis_ carrier with a rainbow arching over it. _Next_.

The USS _Over the Rainbow._ Nimitz class supercarrier. Commissioned May 27th 1975 – decommissioned October 12th 2038. This has to be it. I follow the link, its long history just a blur of black lines as I scroll through.

Then I find it. The Eva.

Someone took a picture from the flight deck and I'm surprised the photographer didn't break their neck just looking up at it. The foot of the red machine is right down next to the conning tower, the rest of it taking up the entirety of the shot and nearly blotting out the sun.

The half-imagined shadows of my nightmares take a defined shape and color. It's not just crazy hallucinations or muttered ramblings anymore. In a moment it turns real, bright red and rigid with black, orange and white accents, heavy and powerful. It's nothing like the monsters I used to imagine – with its huge armored leg, upper structure adorned in thick red plating. Undeniably a machine, with its narrow waist, long legs and broad shoulders mounted with tall pauldrons. I can hear the mechanisms whirl and the metal groan. The source tag under the photo identifies it as Unit-02. My mother's Eva. A combat-tailored model built in Germany. The articles go on to talk about the pilots, mentioning a boy named Shinji Ikari.

I fall into the Angel War, sticking with the pictures – what few there are. I'm not ready to read about it in much detail. I can already feel the jitters in my hand. No anxiety pills. It's so stupid, getting worked up just because of some old pictures. But if panic attacks were reasonable, tangible things to deal with, people might not need medication in the first place.

I don't find any pictures of her, none that aren't of the MIT professor Soryu. The world comes into sharp focus when I scroll over the dated image of a young boy, far too young to be the man I know. But I'd recognize those eyes anywhere.

It's a bit unnerving to realize the entire world has access to pictures of my father when he was younger, while I have none. Well, pictures is inaccurate. There's just one. An old school photo of him when he was thirteen, wearing some black button-up uniform. There's something hidden behind that flat expression. A flurry of something, deeper and darker than any underwater chasm. It wasn't the Angel War that haunted him back then. It was something else, something older.

I've never really stopped to think about it before, just how old they were. It's funny how something so significant can just go over your head, even when it's right in front of you. My parents being in their fifties, that means they were born in the early two-thousands. Two-thousand and one, exactly.

My parents were fourteen when they fought in the Angel War. At least my dad was. Mom was only thirteen. They were just kids.

I exit the page.

He was just fourteen when Third Impact happened.

I've been scared of the war since I can remember. I didn't fight it like my father, but the pieces of it he brought back were more than I ever wanted to experience. I never wanted anything to do with it, just wanted to cover it up and forget like my mother.

When I was little, real little, we used to play hide and seek – only when mom wasn't home, otherwise she'd be in a foul mood the rest of the night. Home time for mother involved peace and quiet with a book, or passing out on the couch face first so it set her reading glasses crooked on her face.

"I'm the best hider in the world," dad would say. "You'll never find me."

It was a challenge – and I was not one to back down. Not ever. I'd always find him by a big toe, sticking out from under a curtain. Or the top of his head peaking up from behind the couch. A pinky finger poking out of a doorway. He always left me little clues.

 _I found you, dad._

Maybe I'd never lost him. Maybe I'd just stopped looking. It was easier than floundering in that wide ocean between us.

The following days drag out in long tendrils, mimicking the bloated trails of exhaust left behind by the airplanes screeching over Washington. I can't think, can't focus. Work and faking human interaction becomes more of a chore than usual. Carrie notices – and shuts off from me. No one wants to deal with a person who carries around so much weight, especially when they know how heavy it can be. Serious emotions aren't something you confront or deal with. You just bury them away and pretend nothing is wrong. Except I'm starting to slip and it exudes itself in this invisible aura. Everyone keeps a quiet distance.

Marina knows my schedule and packs her things while I'm gone. She even leaves the key behind. No note, just empty spaces, like she never existed. I may as well have imagined her this whole time. I don't let myself miss her. That's a right I don't deserve. My inbox piles up, more than I've ever let it in the past year. I take double what I'm supposed to for my anti-nightmare pills, but they don't help much. Somehow all of it bleeds through, soaking everything in sweat – more than my dreams have in years. I can't even be bothered to make coffee in the morning and end up buying that pumped together crap from the cafe down the street.

Another day passes before I decide to call my father.

The line connects after the first ring, catching me off guard. I was hoping he might not pick up again. My foot explores the bumps of the warped linoleum in the kitchen that maintenance keeps blowing off.

"So mom made it home okay and everything?" I ask after we trade hellos. One of those stupid questions you ask when you don't know what the hell else to say.

"Yeah," dad sighs, "put herself right back to work."

"Of course." I shake my head. It's always been her escape. If her and dad were fighting over pills or bills, she'd take on extra hours at the lab, get lost in whatever research she was doing at the time. I guess she needed that time away from my father, away from us.

My father's thinking the same thing. "I don't think she'd know what to do with herself if she wasn't working."

The Kazuya from a couple of weeks ago would have been furious, livid at his plaintive tone. What right did he have to talk that way about her when he doesn't even work? Just gets by on VA disability checks he doesn't deserve. The two weeks ago Kazuya might have lashed out, if he was pumped up with enough medicated courage. Not now. I can't even get the strength to feel much resentment anymore. Talking is taxing enough, but somehow needed. I know that much.

I used to be blind to the destructive ways my mother dealt with things when I was younger, never really acknowledging it until I was older and moving out. It was always dad's fault. He was the one who couldn't forget. He was the one making us miserable. Try as she might, my mother couldn't deal with it as well as she thought, leaving us both helpless in the end.

"So... how are you feeling today?" I ask, having let the line slip into silence just a little too long. The couch swallows me as I collapse in it.

"Fine... I'm sorry, about–"

"Forget it," I say, a little too forceful. As is becoming normal, the line falls into a buzzing drone. Not talking is just how we've learned to deal with one another, I suppose.

"I, uh..." I stutter, catching myself when I realize I'm biting at my nails. Sitting on my hand is only marginally better. "I looked up that ship. It was actually the USS _Over the Rainbow_."

He grunts, a tired attempt at a laugh. "Funny name for a battleship."

"That was how you and mom first met, right?"

"It was our first sortie together too," he says, without a second thought. "Fifth Angel attacked, sank a lot of ships before we were able to deploy." There's nothing restrained behind his tone this time, nothing holding him back. He goes on to recount how my mother dragged him over to the cargo ship trailing along with the fleet, just to show off her Eva. There are so many questions I want to ask – too many. I bite them all back. I don't want him to shutdown again.

All the same, I can't sit anymore and start pacing by the couch. When he pauses, I decide it's as good a time as any to chime in. "I saw a picture of mom's Eva... was yours there?"

"No, I went into your mother's with her. They had it outfitted with B-Type equipment, though. Wouldn't work in water, just lock up – shut down all motor systems."

"Why?"

"Just wasn't made for it. They were designed to be land-based intercept systems. The Angel had us between its teeth after we fell in the ocean."

The Angel? Teeth? "What did it look like?" I ask, head quirking when I realize I don't actually know what an Angel is. Don't have a single clear image of one in my head. They're more or less great big indistinct blobs. It's embarrassing. I should know better than anyone, shouldn't I?

"Sure as hell didn't have wings or a halo," dad says, a bit defensive. His voice is hard now. He doesn't want to talk about the war anymore. I don't press him.

So I try a different approach. "Do you, um... do you have any of that in your book?"

"Book?" he bumbles, testing the word. I can hear him scratching at his chin.

"Yeah, I mean... I remember you were always writing on your computer. I guess I always thought you were putting a book together or something."

I can see him nodding as he says, "Autobiography, but... it's not important. No one wants to read that."

Probably waves his hand at the air too. I shrug. My nails look very enticing. "I might."

"It isn't finished."

"Well, how much more do you have to do?"

A loud sigh crackles over the phone and I hear him shift. He's getting frustrated now, but when he talks again, it's steady – if not begrudging. "Last year, docs diagnosed me with the early stages of Dementia, not sure which kind. Brain damage they said, from all the pills. I'm having trouble remembering a lot of things now. So it doesn't matter, the book won't get finished."

I wish his tone wasn't so flippant, so dismissive with this railgun cracking revelation. "Mom didn't say anything..."

"That's because she doesn't know... and that's the way it's going to stay," he says, a little more patient. Then he laughs and it's bitter. "' _Just something else you'll never finish._ ' That's what she said when I first started it. Guess she was right. Usually is."

I want to say 'sorry' or 'I didn't know', but really, anything I could say would simply be far too inadequate – meaningless. He doesn't want an empty apology. I don't know what he wants. What the hell do you say to your estranged father who's just admitted he has Dementia?

He sighs again. "If you really want to do some reading, try a book called Impact. It was written by Harry Kearsarge, colleague of your mother's."

"Sure, sure," I mumble, still grappling with the news. Can I even be sure that he has it? What if it's a misdiagnosis? He sounds pretty certain. I wonder what type it is, but it really doesn't matter. Either way it's something degenerative and incurable. His brain will slowly rot away until he can't remember us anymore. Until he forgets how to write or read or talk. His body will shutdown because his brain is dying piece by piece. There's medication and ways to make it less severe – but one way or another my father is going to die in a hospital bed someday, wondering who the woman and young man at his bedside are. And he's only 54. Hard for it to be anything other than all the pills, especially if he really did almost OD a few years ago like mom says.

I'd always prayed to God to make my father better. To make it so he wouldn't remember the war anymore.

What a cruel son-of-a-bitch.

I want to ask him how far along it's progressed. He said early stages, so I guess that means he could have anywhere from six to ten years before it gets really bad. There's something else I need to know first.

"Dad... do you want me to call you again tomorrow?"

He grunts, yet I think there's a smile in his voice. "Do you _want_ to call me?"

"I'll take a look at the book."


	20. Interlude X

**Interlude X**

My father's infatuation with his garden began roughly around the same time as his episodes. He'd never bothered to take care of the house or our lawn beforehand, caught up surviving at his job with the news agency before they fired him.

It started with a bougainvillea, which is just as evil as its name looks. The thing was covered with inch long needle-sharp thorns to protect the leathery vines that grew flowers the prettiest shade of purple, hiding its true nature to any outsider. Growing to disproportionate sizes in mere weeks – its stalks bulged more than a pro-wrestler's 'roided arm – it wasted no time trying to consume our house. No matter how many times my father clipped away at it, the vines would come back twice as long and twice as vicious.

It was left behind when we moved, of course. Then in Flagstaff he planted those pointed orange things that look like cranes with neon plumes, which never really took well to the climate. Not like the flamevine that just as greedily consumed everything it touched like the bougainvillea, thankfully lacking any nasty fangs. After we finally settled in Tucson, my father decided to give up on the weeds and any of the more tropical shrubs for good. Our backyard in Catalina went from a barren wasteland to a hub of little crops for radishes, carrots, cabbages, tomatoes – if you can think of it, we probably had it. If my father wasn't in his room, he was out in his garden.

For a time I was jealous of those plants, who had somehow managed to garner more attention from my father than I ever could – no matter how many temper tantrums I threw when I was younger.

"Why's dad like gardening so much?" I asked one day while helping my mother with the dishes. She looked up to the window where I was watching him from, a far away, but warm expression gracing her usually hard and stoic exterior.

"Only one way to find out," she said, touching my back for a light push.

So outside I went.

Frau had passed away not too long ago and I hadn't been going out into the hills so much since then. My room, cushioned with with the music from the player I'd received at ten, was far more appealing. Her grave was lost somewhere in the sprawls of trees and trellises, or so I liked to think. I knew exactly where that spot was. I'd dragged her there.

I was barefoot while walking across the hard, pebble riddled dirt, trying to find where my father had disappeared to. He was kneeling by the roses, hands going about their careful work. He allotted extra care to those glowing crimson buds. Those and the lilacs. Mother's favorite. There was always a vase of them sitting on our kitchen table. Beside me were bushels of pink-red and purple flowers, which may as well have been giant fuzz pillows from afar.

"Do you like the azaleas?" I jumped at my father's voice. He was staring at me and the flowers called my attention back, absorbing me in their light. I shook my head anyway and he grunted, a half-smirk poking at his mouth. Pink and purple weren't boy colors. He didn't care.

"Be careful," he said as I reached a hand out, taking a knee beside me. "Their leaves and nectar are toxic."

"Why?"

"It's just how they protect themselves," he said, hands reaching between the open, bell-shaped buds to snap off dead stalks. "In China, they call it the 'thinking of home bush'. They'll be in bloom all over Japan this time of year."

 _The homeland_. Over the ocean there was a half flooded series of long islands, sunken and bombed out cities left over from a forgotten era. Were its beaches like those in Panama, rough but brushed with the touch of the sea and the roar of the winds? Were its mountains green and thick with summer musk, or scorching and dusty like Arizona?

"Here," father said, handing me his old pair of clippers. "It's your job to take care of them now, okay?" Some rust had spotted the blades and the rubber on the handles was worn away to the rough metal underneath. He _never_ let mom take care of anything in his garden. He saved that for me.

The backyard became a world in and of itself – separate from the house and my father's episodes. They didn't exist out there, not that I ever saw. They couldn't find us amidst the rich yellow plywood and cool, coffee brown dirt. The radiance of the flowers kept all of that at bay.

He was planting watermelons that year and we had to wait long months for the vines to wander and grow their bulbous fruits. Most of our time was spent with our fingers dipping into the soil, caking dirt under our nails and ripping out weeds that looked deceptively similar to the watermelon's budding vines.

"There's nothing more satisfying than helping something grow," my father had said, letting me water them for the first time. The melons had bloated to juicy plump orbs, their vines curling and thick. "Someone showed me once, all before you were born. It took me a long time to understand."

Just like Aunt Misato's villa, the garden became a place to shut down whenever mother was hard on me. If I was being yelled at – not the over exaggerated kind of yelling kids whine about, but the kind full of a very real anger and very real reprimands – I had to stand with my hands behind my back and maintain perfect eye contact with her. When I was being scolded, she wasn't my mother anymore. She was "ma'am" and if I faltered in this protocol in the slightest, my punishment would be worse. I was often confined to my room, left with nothing but schoolwork to do.

It was after one such incident that I retreated to the garden for shelter, getting lost in the azaleas as my father tended the roses.

"Why's she have to be such a bitch all the time?" I mumbled, her words still burning me, even out by the bright flowers. I'd never said anything like that about her before, least of all to my father. I'd never trusted him that much. It just felt good to spit hate at her, even if she wasn't around to hear it. I didn't have the courage to say that to her face, not for another six years.

"She doesn't mean to be that way," he answered, quietly. I sat in the dirt next to where his expert fingers snagged dead petals and brittle branches from the rose bushes. I thought he must have liked the sting of the thorns to handle them without gloves. Or maybe he'd just gotten good at not getting hurt. His fingers pinched one of the sharp barbs, snapping a long fang off to show me. "The roses have thorns to protect themselves, like the azaleas."

"Do you cut your fingers up a lot?"

"A lot."

"If it's painful, why do you do it?"

"Because when you take care of them, they bloom." he snipped one of the roses from its bush and placed it in my palm, nodding me off to the house, where my mother was hunched over a stack of papers in her musty, drab office. I entered with trepidation. It wasn't her favorite like the lilacs and I was still sour at her for my most recent tongue lashing. But when I brought her that little red flower, she could've lit up the whole house with her smile. Dad knew how much it would mean to her coming from me.

He wasn't a man that smiled much, but he smiled then.

He made everything okay.

One day in November, he'd ended up in the hospital with a broken leg and a concussion. Fell off the roof fixing up a patch of shingles, snapping his tibia right below the knee. Had to use a cane for a while after the cast came off. Even today he has a slight limp from the bone never setting quite right again.

I tried to take care of the garden when he couldn't, but it was too much and I didn't understand all the plants like he did. I couldn't even tend to the roses without ripping my fingers open. I never showed him that. He didn't like blood. So I stopped looking after them, frustrated with their thorns and their graying petals.

The doctors had him on a lot of painkillers for those eight weeks his leg mended and all it seemed to do was make his mood swings worse. To the point where he stopped coming outside altogether. His condition had never diminished to begin with, only subsided from time to time. The flowers were starting to die and I didn't know how to save them. Even the azaleas began to wither. That stung more than the thorns of the roses. It was my job to take care of them.

"Don't let my flowers die," he'd said, a hand snagging my shoulder as I walked by, the fact that he was out of his room a rarity once more. Cold sweats kept him up in the night and he wasn't sleeping so well again. I could see how tired he was, how much life had been sucked out of him in just the past few weeks. Or maybe he'd always looked that way and I just never noticed.

"Kazuya. If something ever happens to me, don't let my flowers die, you hear?" he said again, a bit of desperation in his voice as his eyes searched mine. "Promise me."

The garden had become his new drug and he craved it with the same fervent need. As every flashback and nightmare fought for dominance over his reality, it was the one constant he was ever allowed to keep – and he couldn't stand the idea of losing it.

Hesitating, I nodded back, trying not to crumble under the weight on my shoulder.

 _I promise_.

It was winter and the roses weren't in bloom. Come spring time, it didn't matter. They died anyway.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** As I edge ever closer to a ̶m̶i̶d̶w̶a̶y̶ _transitional_ point, I'll likely stop doing the Interludes altogether just so the more immediate story can unfold relatively unhindered.


	21. Chapter 11: December 10

**Chapter 11: December 10**

 _Impact: the Technological Evolution and Moral Ambiguity of Post Second Impact Nations_

In 2003, there was a particular house in Osaka prefecture, Japan. The Nishiguchi house, like old houses everywhere, held secrets. Stories whispered in the shadows, tales etched in dark wood, confidences that if exposed would diminish the teller and scar the listener.

In 1991 the Japanese stock market crashed. Equity and asset prices fell. Banks and insurance companies had storage units packed to the ceiling with books of bad debt. The nation fell into a crippling stagnation.

There wasn't very much use for an embryologist like Toshiro Nishiguchi, fresh out of Nagoya University, and aiming to fill the Nobel peace prize-winning shoes of his father. Instead, Toshiro struggled as a pharmacist at a local drug store chain up until 2000. In the following year, the JSSDF was under investigation for war crimes in Sumatra. Entire coastal prefectures had been taken underwater and Tokyo was little more than a black crater.

Japan was on the brink of utter collapse.

There was not much use for an embryologist like Toshiro Nishiguchi, who had so thoroughly dedicated his life to such a specific branch of biology, toiling away on the boat cities of Imabari in the wake of Second Impact. Until a particular UN joint research laboratory erected itself in the Hakone region, in need of such a very particular biologist. What the gap between 2000 and 2003 entailed for our intrepid embryologist is hard to pin down in detail. He was married late in 2001, taking in a step daughter with the union. On August 19th of 2003, the former had been missing for two months and the latter purportedly hadn't shown up for school in nearly a year.

That day, Mr. Nishiguchi left his house in Osaka prefecture and never came back. He was found on an isolated island off the coast hanging from a maple tree, a note tucked in his pocket, scrawled with a short message:

 _I was never fond of towns, houses, society or, it seems, civilization._

His wife and step daughter were never found. He was, as we now know, in part responsible for developing the cloning phases for the biologically based Evangelion weapon system.

In many ways, Mr. Nishiguchi adequately frames the mindset of post Third World War Japan–

"Langley." I jump, a knee banging against the underside of my desk. Pip stands across from me, eyes not quite as sleep deprived as usual. "Planning on taking Chief's place? Desk is shaping up real nice. Whole Department's backlogged."

I close the book and move it out of sight, other hand rubbing my knee. The in-pile has reached new heights, my very own leaning tower. The empty, sterile and sometimes dust-laden space on my desk has now been occupied by smaller, disorganized piles of paperwork. So much for being Department Manager.

"Guess I've been distracted lately."

Pip takes a sip from his coffee, the equivalent of a shrug. His pale, yellowish fingers take the book up from where I tried to hide it under my monitor. On the cover is a pair of webbed, golden wings. I'm glad my father gave me the writer's name, otherwise I never would have found it in the mind-numbingly long list of books similarly titled _Impact_.

"Impact," Pip says, tossing it back atop my desk. "Didn't peg you for that _Culto di Cassius_ shit."

Shamal and Fredric glance over from their desks and I frown, hiding the book again. "I'm not. It's supposed to be about the Angel War."

"Isn't that grade school stuff? You absent that day Langley? Home schooled?"

It isn't easy to glare at someone like Pip, mostly because his dead-on-the-inside expression makes you feel stupid for even trying. So I work my jaw, tapping my fingers instead of chewing on them. "You're pretty talkative today."

Another sip-shrug. "D-ten. Dad was a firefighter in Newark, before the riots. Heavy drinker, real asshole. Kinda hated the guy. Died last year."

Newark. It wasn't enough that most of it had burned down in the 1960s and was subjected to some nasty rioting in the same decade, but displaced Japs had turned the city into a warzone. A lot of dead firefighters. Nobody lives there now except the homeless and the criminally-inclined poor. Most of it is abandoned. Today's the anniversary.

"Sorry to hear that," I say, carefully. If anyone would have reason to hock spit and curse at me for looking Japanese, I suppose it would be Pip. Instead, he stares into his mug and dumps the brown slop he calls coffee into my trash can.

"Old man was sick of living anyway. Drank himself to death."

The relative quiet between us is measured – weighted. I can't say I know Pip, not even as a coworker. He's just our resident blunt and to-the-point kind of asshole. I've seen him chuckle _once_ and it was at dead baby jokes on the net. But for him to still be standing at my desk tells me the subject isn't something he tosses about lightly.

"You miss him?" I ask.

Pip doesn't answer for a long, strangled moment.

"Hard to miss a man I never knew," he says, dropping the coffee mug into my can too. With that, he shambles off and I peer into the trash bin, where I can read the red, bolded letters printed on the cup: _World's Greatest Dad_.

I pretend to work for the next six hours, making my manila pile a little neater. Now it's a very organized stack of unfiltered case files. Class-A Manager. I'm sure I'll be chewed out by the Chief later, but I just don't care anymore. He could fire me right now and I don't think I'd blink an eye. Not with this book in front of me. It's the first real piece of the war I've ever bothered to take in, even if it never really talks about the conflict itself. I'm okay with that. Baby steps.

Harry takes entire chapters to deal with background development of the Evangelions. It's disturbing that nations who held themselves as sophisticated and socially advanced had decided the _Hitlerjugend_ wasn't such a bad idea after all and brought the program up to 21st century standards. I phase out of some parts, wondering what kind of training an Eva pilot must've been put through. Not even Harry knows for sure.

By the end of the day, I've entered a few new classifications in our servers, and read at least a hundred pages. Back at my apartment, I force myself to wait another hour or so before dialing home. I'm excited to tell my father what I've read so far, nervous too.

"It was actually the Sixth Angel," I say after he answers. "The one that attacked the Pacific Fleet, I mean."

The book described it as something like a Mosasaur, some old prehistoric fish – except the Angel's teeth were easily the size of an Eva's arm. Said they punched right through the fortified armor. Jesus, I'm a freaking kid again, all too eager to share my knowledge.

"Was it?" he asks, thoughtful. "I know the one before it looked like a big diamond. Guess that was the Fifth."

Harry spent exactly one sentence explaining it was an octahedron, but I don't correct him, fumbling for the name instead. My fingers snap. "Ramiel."

"Yeah, my third sortie."

"I also read that they hooked up the Evas with cables," I say, trying to reign in my amusement. I know everything was pretty run down and slapped on back then, but I never suspected the most powerful WMDs of the 21st century would have to be plugged into the wall outlet. I suppose no one ever thought they would be operated by kids either.

"It was the only way Nerv could power them. Hooking up a nuclear reactor inside a machine made for close quarters combat didn't seem too bright an idea. Especially not in the middle of a city. So they used cables. Ended up screwing us over more often than not. Without them, you only had five minutes of power from the internal batteries. Coil range was short too and you'd get stuck if you didn't keep track of it. Then you'd have to unplug and jack in a new one – _if_ there was another plug nearby."

"Did that ever happen to you?"

A sardonic chuckle answers me first. "No. Angels usually cut the damn thing off before I could do much of anything. Happened to your mom once. We were moving into position around an Angel, right in the city, and I got impatient. I think she tried to save me." the last part he adds hesitantly and I hear him shift over the line.

I meander into the kitchen, searching for coffee. "Save you from what?"

"The Angel," he says, pausing and sounding a little more exasperated this time. "I don't remember its name. It had a shadow that could suck you up into it. That's what happened to me."

"Did that one have teeth too?"

"No. It was a big black and white striped ball – floating up in the sky."

I blink, trying to build a mental image. So far the book hasn't talked much about the Angels. Harry doesn't seem interested in the battles themselves.

"How did you get out?"

"What do you care what your old man did in some stupid war?" he asks, the twinge of a sneer there. It takes me aback, like it did yesterday. He still doesn't trust me.

I suppose it's justified. I've said some pretty awful shit over the years. Still, I want to throw my phone out the window. Stinging words try and tempt my tongue into giving them voice. I clamp my mouth shut and, with deliberate movements, I lie back on the bed, free arm stiff at my side. Staying upright is hard.

"So when are you going to tell mom?" I manage after a while.

"What?"

Ah, I've surprised him.

"About the Dementia."

He grumbles a bit, rueful now. "She won't know for a while, not if I can help it."

"Why?"

"I don't want her to worry," he mutters, but his tone gives him away.

"You're a pretty lousy liar, dad," I droll, doing my best not to sound accusatory. While I certainly learned how to pretend to be happy from my parents, lying has never been a well-honed art for the Soryu men, not with a woman like my mother. You could be talking to her from across the world with a voice modulator – and she'd still know if you were bullshitting her.

My father sighs.

"Kazuya... do you like yourself?" he asks. The question makes the line bleed out, because I don't know how to answer. "Are you happy with who you are?"

"Yeah, I guess," I say, chewing on a finger. Then my nerves become razors, splitting into me and releasing that resentment I keep pushing down. "Why? Got some fatherly advice after all these years? Going to tell me how to live my life right?" I hop off the bed, heart beating faster. "Tell me _dad_ , what should I do?"

"What you _should've_ done is taken me out back and hit me over the head with our shovel," he growls.

A cold avalanche may as well have swept through my apartment.

Back when we buried Frau, I saw him standing down in that grave with her – a pair of corpses. As much as I might have wished it, dreamed of it, I never wanted to be the one standing over his tombstone – not like those other kids at the military base in Jacksonville.

There was one night, out by the dark palmettos and flame vines in our old Panama house, where someone had interrupted the clacking of the loose screen door out front. A broken window and smashed-in door later, some asshole made off with our T.V. and a toaster. Dad went out and bought a handgun the next day – forty-five caliber Smith and Wesson. It quickly became his own bit of insurance – a way to make those threats of suicide all the more present. I know it didn't start that way, but that's what his brain twisted it to be. An escape route. _I can always go. I can always leave if I want to._

He wouldn't shout that he was going to blow his brains out, not like in Catalina. In fact, it was how quietly it all happened that made it so much worse.

"I'm going down to the beach," he'd say, walking out with that gun at his hip. Sometimes he wouldn't come back until morning. Mother stayed out on the porch with her pack of Newports, emptied by the time he got home. She got tired of that real quick. One day took his gun, drove out to the beach and hurled it into the ocean.

When we moved out to Catalina, when they would fight and he had nowhere to escape except out the front door, I used to wish he'd died in that goddamn war. I came so close to telling him too. But a small sliver of me was afraid, as always, that those words to him might be my last.

"I must be the world's greatest dad, huh?" he says, bringing me into the present again. I can hear how tired he is of talking, of everything. Like this is it for us. I could hang up right now, and that really would be the end of it. We'll go on staying out of one another's lives, until one day he forgets me and I put him six feet under, hating him all the same. But I don't want to be angry anymore. I'm tired too.

I'm so tired of being miserable.

"Guess that makes me the world's greatest son."

He makes a cough that might've been the start of a laugh and I feel a crooked smile come free, though it doesn't last. I step onto the linoleum, picking at that warped square from spilled coffee long nights ago. I never got to know this man, Shinji Soryu. Who he was, what he valued in life. There were bits and pieces. Parts of a man who was kind and had a gentle heart.

"Why'd you do it, dad?" I ask, throat raw. "Why'd you always lock yourself up in your room?"

For the most part, I've always known where I stood with my mother – never with my father. Up until I was sixteen, I had started to assume that he just hated me. That there must have been something wrong with me. When I realized that he did care, I didn't know what to think. I'd trusted him and been betrayed so many times before. I decided it was better to push him and those feelings away.

"I'd hear a noise, catch a whiff of some smell," he stops, struggling for words. "And it was like I was sitting right back in the entry plug again. Like I was fighting the Angels. It all just... overflowed." he sighs through his nose and I can feel his reluctance.

"I didn't want to hurt you," he says, and I think I hear a bit of hurt there too. As if that's something I should have realized. How could I have? Most memories I have of my father can be associated with the door to his room. I used to draw on it too, just to make him mad, just to get him to look at me and yell at me. Rotten things like ' _liar_ ' or ' _crazy old man_ '. It never worked, bringing down mother's wrath instead. As punishment she would have me hold stress positions, sometimes with an armful of books or something else just as heavy. The sitting position was her favorite.

"Your mother said to me once, in Panama, after she tossed out that old forty-five," he goes on, trying to fill the silence for both of us. "She said, _'you've got a son to take care of. You can die later'_. Your old man was a real fool back then, Kazuya."

"Was?"

"Still is," he grumbles and I know there's a smile this time. "Smartass."

I'm not sure why, but that makes me smile too. They're exactly alike, he and mom. So hard to deal with, so stubborn. In their own ways of course.

As I grew older, I came to realize how scared I was of getting close to anyone. Because I hurt people so much and so well that it became second nature. I hated being that way. When I couldn't reign in that anger and anxiety, I found ways to hurt myself instead. I knew if I didn't, I'd end up catching someone else in the whirlwind. Someone far less deserving.

When I was with Carrie, we used to fight about everything. Stupid, little, insignificant things like which route to take to work, where to go out that night, cleaning around our respective apartments. When I started to feel like I was slipping, I'd pop a few pills and let her rail into me instead of arguing. I wouldn't try and reach out and reason with her as she told me what a terrible person I was. If I didn't put up a fight, if I just let her hurt me and get it out of her system, everything would be fine. We could keep going on. One day things would be better.

That was just make believe, and all it did was push Carrie further away from me. So she started hiding my pills. I screamed at her then, made threats, lost control – like my father and his episodes.

"Do you think you'll come down for Christmas this year?" he asks, switching gears. We've both had enough of the war for tonight.

"Hell, I don't know. We've never been big on it. You know how mom gets."

"I know."

We never had a tree in the living room, never put up colored lights or exchanged presents. Mother couldn't stand it.

On Christmas Eve my parents would send me over to Misato's so they could have the house to themselves. The next day, me and mom would laze about in the living room watching sports. There's only one Christmas I can remember my father ever coming out of his room. He'd settled into his armchair – a huge seat of red leather stuffed to bursting with padding. We called it the Throne.

He was folding paper in the shape of a crane and I sat on the floor next to him, where he taught me how to make them. He wanted to see if we could manage to make a thousand before the day was up. Mother glanced our way every now and then, content to spend Christmas watching hockey and cursing at the television in her native tongue. I'm pretty sure the only reason she cared for the sport at all was for the violence, and I'm more than pretty sure she just liked getting riled up with all that adrenaline.

Whatever team she was rooting for – the Jersey Devils were her favorite – I'd pick the opposite, just for the chance to gloat when my team won. Eventually, as night came crawling, mother made crepes and sat down to fold paper cranes, helping us litter the floor with them.

On my floor, here in Silver Springs, the linoleum tile's been ripped open by my fingers, bits and pieces torn off and thrown to the side.

"Maybe next year, dad."

* * *

The eighteenth interim report for the Intelligence Community Analysis Assistance Plan is missing. Not that the project has gained any headway in the last month, but the big wigs like having officially labeled, dry assessments to read over – even if it could all be summed up in a sentence or less – as opposed to twenty-two pages. Communicating with the other offices shared by our department has been enough of a hair-pulling hassle. So everyone is in a sour mood and the Chief gives us all shit.

He tells me to, "just sit the fuck down," after I spend a few minutes floundering through papers looking for the damn report. The higher-ups must be getting on his case. The plan itself has proven to be a giant waste of time for the past two years. It's basically a very officially worded _find ways to do your job better_ kind of project. For which the Project Committee has been less than helpful.

After we've been thoroughly chewed out, the Chief calls for me to stay behind. I can count on my hand the number of times I've seen him out from behind the Great Wall. He's thin, deathly thin, skin wrinkled and wrapped tight to his bones. If that wasn't enough of an indicator that the man is edging into his eighties, he's got this gray, forever frizzed hair clinging to his balding scalp.

When the last person files out, he leans against the conference desk, fixing me with a pair of beady eyes that glint – dangerously. "Kazuya, you're a hard worker, but no one gives a damn who your father was. Well... maybe some do, but I don't."

I think I manage to hide my surprise. I hadn't thought I was being so obvious about it. But there isn't much that the CIA considers confidential about its employees. The Chief already knows everything – even has the psych reports from my sessions with the therapists. It's all apart of the screening process. He reaches back and takes something from his opened briefcase, letting it slap down on the table between us.

It's Harry's book.

"We've all got baggage – but rule one is that you don't bring it here."

When did he grab it from my desk? It doesn't matter, I knew this was coming. I really shouldn't be surprised.

"You going to fire me?"

Chief huffs. "If you can't get your act together, I'll have to replace you. You've got a week to get that head on straight."

At the very least I'm being given a choice – and a week's notice too. It's tempting. Throw the book out, call mom and dad a few times a month, keep working. Keep _living_. That way, I can just plow through the holidays on my own, empty a bottle of brandy on the Eve, and keep making half-assed forays into the Angel War.

"How about the rest of the month?" I ask. Even with the days I've already taken, I still have an entire month's worth of vacation time to use before the year's up.

Chief works his jaw, allowing himself a wheezing chuckle and shaking his head. One of his withered hands shoos me out as he turns away, grumbling, "Oh the Committee is going to love this..."

Go stay with my parents for a few weeks, or lose my job.

If it wasn't so ridiculously expensive to live in Washington, I might choose the latter.

* * *

The next day, I ask my father about A-tens.

I've read through more of the book and going by the title, I should have expected Harry would be dealing more with the political end of it all as opposed to the Evas and their battles. It's late in the evening when I call and he seems to be in a better mood, even a little candid.

"Couldn't do it without them," he says, and I recall how often he would wake in a panic trying to find them. "Well, you could synchronize just fine, but you couldn't project commands without the A-tens."

I stop pouring coffee. "What do you mean synchronize?"

"Pilots were linked mentally and physically to the Eva. That's how you controlled it, the trade off being sympathetic pain."

I guess I always pictured it like the cockpit of an airplane. How the hell do you connect a person to such a huge machine?

"So if the Eva was damaged, you got hurt too?"

"If your sync-ratio was high enough. Otherwise you could feel the pain, but it wouldn't manifest into any physical trauma. Neural shock would've been enough to kill us a few times."

The half-painted imagery of Toji's story churns up. All that talk of blood and ripping. Does that mean he felt all of that as my father's Eva tore into his? A tremble shivers tight around my stomach and the coffee isn't nearly so alluring anymore. All those marks on my mother's skin. The Eva's wounds were real for her once, too.

"Did you... ever get hurt like that?"

"No, woke up in the hospital more times than I can count, though. They had to stick me in an intensive care pod once."

The beginning of another question jumps free, only to be cut off by my father. "Your mother says the Rangers are facing off against the Devils this year. I don't keep up with sports, but I know you used to like the Rangers a lot."

Like is a bit much. I don't keep up with sports either. The only time I ever did was with mom and, the Rangers being the decidedly brutal adversaries of the Devils, naturally I gravitated towards them. One year I ordered a big team banner online and hung it up for Christmas.

2041 – Rangers came out on top 6-2. Victory was sweet. I kept that banner up for the rest of the week, taunting my mother every chance I got.

"Rotten kid," she'd say, but couldn't keep a smile from me forever.

I suppose that's all I'll be getting out of my father tonight.

Every conversation between us has been like trying to pry a clam open with toothpicks. I'm worried that he just doesn't remember much of it anymore, so he shuts up because he's embarrassed, because we're finally able to come to some understanding and he doesn't have the answers. Or that's just what I want it to be, instead of acknowledging I've turned my back too many times for him to open up – or that I might ever be able to understand anyway.

I crouch down over the eviscerated linoleum from a day ago, picking at the remnants. "What's your favorite memory of mom when you were kids?"

He makes a thoughtful noise. "I don't remember much."

Classic line.

"Well, what _do_ you remember?"

His tongue clicks and I think he holds back a sigh. I pick the patch of tile clean, revealing a black, stained floor beneath the thin covering. The contrast with the faded beige of the other tiles is sharp and for a while all I can do is stare into it.

"We were training for a battle," dad says, rough voice softer. "Me and your mom didn't get along so well at first and Misato threatened to take her off the mission. So she stormed off to the convenience store down the street. I went after her and we sat out on a balcony for a while. Well, I was sitting, she was standing, stuffing her face with junk food while she ranted about Misato. Sun was setting I think. We stayed out there for a long time. I remember thinking she was kind of pretty, all worked up like that."

I can hear another voice then, distant and indistinct. It can only be my mother.

Dad chuckles. "I've just been corrected. Apparently, I _have_ and always _will_ think your mother is the most beautiful woman I have ever met from the minute I laid eyes on her."

"Naturally," I say, smirking.

Thoughts of Catalina and my last visit fill the nooks and crannies of my small kitchen. I've already taken the month off from work, but I've been debating all day if I actually want to go back to Arizona. Sitting on my coffee table is the photo album mom brought up. She left it here with me, so I could remember how happy I used to be.

"You can let her know I'll be coming down for Christmas," I say, pulling at another tile piece.

"Your room's still here, just the way you left it."

"Really?"

There's a smile again, and something wistful. "Your mother's been waiting a long time for you to come home."


	22. Interlude XI

**Interlude XI**

My mother grew up in a little town called Bernau, just outside of Berlin. A cozy, quiet town with open fields and old forests. Her parents were well off and owned a small manor in the countryside out on its golden pastures, where she lived up until the age of eleven before leaving for Heidelberg University. According to my father, she couldn't remember a single Christmas before the age of five, nor any after it. That year she'd gotten a lump of coal instead of presents for misbehaving, and hasn't liked celebrating it ever since.

My father never talked about his upbringing, but it was clear the holiday had never been apart of it. Apparently it wasn't a national kind of festivity like it is in America. So it passed like any other day for me.

Every now and then I was sent down to stay with the Suzuhara's in Louisiana for a week or so. At least before they moved to settle in Hokkaido. It was the end of the year, and I remember thinking how strange their Christmas was compared to mine. They couldn't afford much in the way of presents, not with eight mouths to feed. So their mother usually gave them something handmade – shirts, pillows or stuffed animals for the little ones. We never exchanged gifts back home, so it was awkward that year when there was a present amidst the pile with my name on it. A shirt designed by Hachiro that, by his request, said 'Honorary Suzuhara' in all of his near-illegible kanji.

"An ancient and proud Samurai name," he told me with a grin.

Even my friends back in Arizona thought it odd I didn't celebrate the holiday, saying it must have been "some weird Japanese thing". There didn't appear to be much of a difference, save for religious trappings I attempted to adopt in secret. But in the end I was just pretending, making yet another shallow attempt to patch up the holes in my identity with conformity. I had only believed in God whenever it was convenient, and prayed to Buddha only to be polite while staying with the Suzuhara's. During my earlier visits, I had scoffed at the idea of taking part in this strange worship, even if most people from the homeland still practiced it.

"Why do you pray to Buddha?" I had asked Aunt Hikari. Everyone else was asleep and I had woken up for water, finding her there praying at their little shrine. "How's it any different than praying to God? What's the point of praying if you still live in a small house with holes and leaks?"

At first she didn't answer, eyes closed and hands pressed together. Between her palms was a rosary made of pale sandalwood, while her lips uttered words too soft for me to discern. Upon the altar, an empty slot on a bookshelf, there were offerings of water and raspberries. As well as a tupperware container on the right filled with baking soda to hold the incense, the smell of which singed at my lungs. Resting upon a red silk pillow with worn threads was a metal bowl, smoke swirling over it and curling around the Buddha idol in the center. After a moment, she struck the bowl with a wooden stick and I understood then why they called it a singing bowl.

She smiled that smile of hers, the kind that seemed full of some boundless wisdom, but never judged you for knowing less.

"I don't pray to Buddha. Not in the same way someone might pray to God," she said, the voice of the bell fading.

"But you pray like Christians do."

She had giggled at that. "There are many different types of worship, Kazuya. For Buddhism, it is about showing respect towards the things we admire. The shakyamuni is a symbol of human perfection, an ideal to strive for. The aromas of incense remind us of the influence of virtue. The lamps remind us of the light of knowledge and the flowers, which soon fade and die, remind us of impermanence. When we bow, we express outwardly what we feel inwardly; our gratitude for what Buddha has taught us. The point isn't to pray for things, but to have faith in something larger than ourselves."

"But why?"

"I can't answer that for you," she said kindly, shifting to face me while still sitting on her knees. The hand wrapped with her rosary reached out, a finger poking my chest. "That's something you'll have to figure out on your own. Whether with God or Buddha, we all have to look within, not without, to find understanding."

She kissed the top of my head, a mother to all under her care, and sent me back to bed. I laid wide awake the rest of the night trying to decipher her words. When morning came, she set about her prayers once more, the ring of the singing bowl ushering in the dawn. Aunt Hikari's sons, much to her occasional lament, were not very diligent Buddhists like her. She never impressed such things upon me, however. Either because she was too polite, or because both my mother and father were devout in nothing, and she assumed I would turn out the same anyway.

But recently I had noticed the trinket my mother had begun to carry with her. The golden cross she tried to hide under her shirts, the chain of which I had glimpsed around her neck beneath the collar of her suits. I wondered about God again, because only a week ago we were told that Grandfather Langley had passed away, and I wondered where he would go. Would he go back to the scar in the sky? Did that mean he would be able to come back again? No one seemed to have an answer, not even the Ecclesiastes and their Third Eye.

Germany was a dreary and chilly country, at least when I went. It was sometime in September and I was ten. At the funeral home there were crowds and cliques of people I'd never met, and likely never would again. My parents and I were separated from everyone else, both during the wake and the procession to the graveyard. No one paid us much mind, even though my mother was the man's only daughter. It didn't matter to everyone else. Ever since Impact, he had a new life. A new family.

Afterward, while my mother socialized, more out of a stubborn refusal to be ignored than anything else, we stood off to the side and away from everyone. I'd been watching the other people at the ceremony, many of whom were sporting U.S. Army uniforms. I watched the aunts, cousins and sisters cry when caretakers buried the casket, feeling out of place since I couldn't be as sad as them. I tried to be.

"How come mom doesn't cry?" I had asked. Not a single tear the entire time, just that small cross in her hand.

"She's never really gotten along with her father," dad said, distant, hands in his pocket while he followed her movements.

"If she hated him, then why did we come to his funeral?"

"She didn't hate him... at least not as much as she thought."

"Then she should have just said so."

"It's not so easy, Kazuya. Wouldn't you–" he stopped, something pained revealing itself, despite the sunglasses hiding his eyes. We didn't talk the rest of the ceremony. Even then, I knew what it was he was going to ask.

 _Wouldn't_ _ **you**_ _be sad if I was gone?_

I didn't give him the answer hanging on the tip of my tongue, reasoning that it would only upset mother. In truth, I didn't know the answer then anymore than I do now. In the moment, I imagine that I am at my father's funeral instead. I imagine that I am like my mother, that I am brave and that I do not cry. In some moments I hold my mother's golden cross and light a candle for him and pray. In others I gather flowers and burn incense and ring the singing bowl.

But in every instance, I feel empty.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** Shouldn't be too long before the next chapter. Planning on one more Interlude before the final stretch.


	23. Chapter 12: December 13

**Chapter 12: December 13**

It's happened.

I've started to miss her.

The clock on the wall ticks, steadily passing the time in an apartment that is half empty and so very, very quiet. I could turn on the T.V. but there is nothing that I would care to watch, or I could fire up the computer, though there is nowhere on the net that I really need to go. Harry's book sits on the dining table in front of me, the edges already a bit worn from use. It's closed, for now, and I can't even muster the will to read any of it today. The book doesn't answer the questions I have, not in the way that I want. There aren't any shortcuts in life, not when it comes to trying to figure out how to relate to a father you don't know, or trying to figure out why you're so lonely – even though I was as lonely as ever when me and Marina were still together.

Just this morning I caught myself heating up two mugs of coffee in the microwave. The black flooring, where there used to be linoleum, was sticky under my bare feet, but at least it's stopped smelling like burnt Colombian beans. The french press continues to sit idle.

I check my right wrist, where a watch ticks in-sync with the clock on the wall. Perfect, synchronous clacks of time passing in utter harmony. There is a crack on the glass and the metal that keeps it snug around my wrist has worn away at the edges, showing the light copper beneath the silver paint. The gold inlay has flaked a bit too. It is not a cheap watch, by any means. The fact that I have had it since I was thirteen is testament enough to that.

There's little else I've carried with me since leaving home. Nearly everything in my apartment is new. The furniture, the appliances, the calendar and clock, as well as the two little wooden elephant figurines on the kitchen bar-top. No pictures on the walls. Marina had put all of those up, gone now. She took the book cases too, along with all the books. She must have gotten her brothers in to help her move everything. The collection of ceramic unicorns she inherited from her grandmother have been whisked away, leaving cordoned off spaces in the carpet. I used to complain about how much space her things took up in our already small apartment.

I was expecting there to be a lot tears out of this. I'd imagined for the past few months what I would say when I told Marina we should part ways, even accepted the fact that when she started to weep and beg me to stay, I would concede, and we would be happy for a month or so. Then we would each fall back into the same routine and be miserable again.

Yet here I am, in a studio apartment that feels far too big. For all her faults, Marina was a kind enough soul. She had her own traumas to deal with, but we all do, and in the end I was the one who made her cruel and filled her with insecurities. If I'd been able to love her, surely things wouldn't have turned out this way.

On the table, next to the book, is a new bottle of prescribed anxiety pills. I've taken two this morning, but after going without for a week, I really did need them. Despite the warnings on the capsule, I've also finished off at least four cups of caffeine, mostly because there is nothing else for me to do. I have a flight later in the day, my suitcase is already packed and I don't have work, so aside from the coffee, there's really only one thing left to do until I leave. It's just working up to it that's proving to be a problem. Despite our talks and our awkward laughs, I know one of us is going to pry the wrong way and this ticking time bomb between us is going to burst.

I take another anxiety pill as I dial my father. When we greet one another, the silence has become less uncomfortable and more a ritual practice of our contact. We each scrounge for what might pass as normal, everyday conversation, like how mother is doing, or I might inquire about his garden, while he asks me how work is. It's the only thing he asks about, since it is the only facet of my life he is at all familiar with.

Inevitably, we come to subject both of us have been dancing around.

"So they only had a few Evas, right?" I finally ask, fingers tapping against my knee. "Who else was in your, ah – squadron?" I'm sure I've just made a fool of myself, but I've no idea what one might call a whole unit of Evangelions. It seems like a solid guess.

I'm relieved when he doesn't correct me. "Well, your mom wasn't transferred over until after the third battle... I knew Rei before that. Rei Ayanami."

I know that name. Not from Harry's book, but from that article on the net. "Were you good friends?"

"Not really. At least, not in the sense other people understand. She was real quiet, barely talked to anybody."

"Guess she, uh, must've liked you then. Did she... ever come back?"

"No," he says, just a little too quick. He catches himself, and when he speaks again, he sounds like he's spent the last decade smoking. "No, she... she died."

"Oh... sorry." I mean it too. I shouldn't have assumed, but, there are still plenty of people up in the red scar. I thought maybe–

"It was the Seventeenth Angel," he says, straining as he reaches for something. "This long halo of light. It started to penetrate the Eva – split into it and infect it like a virus. Rei set her core to self-destruct to kill it."

An Angel of light. How desperate was the war that one of the few machines built to fight them could be sacrificed like that? My echoing and dust-gathering apartment, with its ticking gears, is so far removed from such a world. I'm in a bubble, trying to communicate with the beings outside.

"Where was mom?" I ask. Surely she wouldn't just sit by during a battle like that. Was she injured? Was she close with Rei too?

"She couldn't connect to her Eva anymore... couldn't even get it to move. Rei engaged the Angel first and they sent me in as backup, but my power line was cut and it started to infect Unit-one too. There was nothing we could do."

Over the line, I can hear the faint sounds of purring, wondering if he's taken Myshka – the cat he claims to hate – into his lap.

"Did she have any family?"

The crackling static between us lasts far too long.

"No. No one but my father."

I blink. "I... I don't understand, was she your half-sister or something?"

"Best to just leave this one be, son."

He's gotten frustrated, changed subjects or outright refused to discuss something further, but he's ever warned me away from it. I stand, heading into the kitchen, which has become some sort of strange refuge with our conversations. Most of the other tiles have been ripped up.

"Your mother tells me you're still with that girl, Marina," he says before I can think of something to prolong the conversation with. I very much doubt that's what she actually said, but his tone is back to normal, content to forget we ever talked about the pilot named Rei Ayanami.

It's hard to speak. Admitting you're alone and unhappy is easy enough in your own head, but saying things like that out loud validates them – makes them real. My eyes betray me, looking to the torn envelope on the counter by the sink.

"No, not anymore," I say, shrugging. There's no point in lying. I stare at the open letter, enjoying the sensation of falling that my peripherals create from the black hole beneath me.

"That's a shame," he says, hesitating, now the one treading on thin ice.

"Dad... is there..." I make something between a groan and a sigh, a hand roughing my hair. "Is there something wrong with me?"

"What do you mean? Are you sick?"

"No, I mean... me and Marina broke up a couple weeks ago and..." I pace around, peering at the window and trying not to give into the urge to tear at the linoleum or Yuki's letter. "I hurt her. I know it's because there's something wrong with me. I... I can't keep a relationship with anyone. I always drive them off, or they leave and I don't know... I don't know how to... _fix_ myself."

It comes out quiet when I say it. But it's true, I'm broken. That's the only way I can reason feeling like this. The only way I can explain losing Yuki and never getting her back, not the way I always imagined. I'd been able to forget about that for a while. She likes to send me letters, since both of us have always hated talking on the phone and sitting with pen and paper lets her kill an hour or so while out at sea. We'll have five or six conversations going in the same correspondence. Recently, knowing that she's engaged, knowing that she gets to be happy while I wake up alone in the morning, it's been getting harder and harder reading what she writes.

I've never been a good boyfriend, and it looks like I'm not much of a friend, either.

"There's nothing wrong with you," dad tells me, gentle, and I can see those sad eyes of his. "That's just how people are... there's nothing wrong with you."

I don't believe him.

So I don't say anything. I wish he could see, wish he could admit to how hard those times were. I wonder if he knows – if Misato has told him that his son is just like him. No, he couldn't know. My aunt has always been one to keep secrets.

I listen to the cat hum.

"Your mom used to hate me," he says. "Back when we were pilots. Hated my guts."

Despite their old arguments, I find this far more difficult to believe. To me, they've always been together and I can't really picture a time when they weren't.

A bit of a chuckle comes through his end. "You should see this cat right now. He's a real snuggle bug, you know. Always manages to sleep on my face when we go to bed."

"Sounds like he's more your cat than mom's."

He huffs. "She won't admit it, but it's true. Little beast peed on my shoes his first day and then he was my best friend. I prefer the dog."

I think this is the first real grin I've had in days. That dog always did know how to bring my smiles back. "You remember when Frau used to get real excited whenever we got back?"

He laughs. "She'd start spinning in circles trying to catch her little nub of a tail."

Even with thoughts of our old war dog, I can hear it, the act he's putting on for me. He's still thinking about what I said, about what else he could possibly say in return. I'm not sure that I want him to say anything, or what resonance I was trying to achieve by bringing it up. To think that I can't keep those things to myself and just deal with them. He must think me a sorry excuse for an adult.

"Kazuya..." he says, reaching out only to fall short.

I check my watch and swallow.

"Well, hey, I've got to go. I'll see you soon, okay?" I say, even though my flight isn't leaving for another four hours, and he agrees, reluctantly. I hang up and set the phone on the table, face down, standing in the quiet with nothing to do.

The watch on my wrist has stopped ticking.


	24. Interlude XII

**Interlude XII**

The baseball field at Catalina Foothills High School was a sad affair. For maybe a few months out of the year it would be a spotty green after a new layer of sod grass failed yet again to take to the dry soil. More often than not games turned into a sand storm, coating everyone in a layer of orange grit.

I would hang out on the other side of the fence, watching the games by a particularly tall cactus that occasionally graced me with shade. With the winds and the sands, I'd imagine skim-boarding in Florida. Holding that thin plate of wood up to my chest, waiting for the right moment. As the waves spilled over the coast, my body would shiver as I watched the tide suck them back in, until there was just the barest sheen of water clinging to the sands – there! The perfect moment. I'd run and throw the board down ahead of me, streaking over the beach atop it and basking in the sharp spray of the sea.

Inevitably, the water would recede, and the board would catch in the sand, sending me tumbling down face first. I'd get back up, caked in muck, but determined to watch the shores again, waiting for the next moment to grasp.

That was all just a part of the dream. In reality, I was never very good at predicting the tides. Not those of the ocean, and certainly not those of people.

Everyone has at least one bad year of high school. It's a fumbling journey, navigating relationships, figuring out where your place is in the social hierarchy, if anywhere. Most kids had their parents to talk to, or a relative, a friend. Someone. I'd managed to isolate myself from everyone, even Misato, the only person who had ever come close to understanding. Everyone else I knew was too busy wallowing in their own paradigms, as people often do and I didn't know how to seek out help, even if I had ever entertained the notion to past sixteen. I was far too stubborn. All I had was me. For a while, I convinced myself that was all I needed.

The lone hour after school was blissful, with music to drown out the stagnant buzz of Tucson before I inevitably had to return to the front lines. Everyone would sit under the aluminum awnings waiting for our fleet of buses to arrive, the hordes of us without beat up cars of our own, or wealthy parents to buy us camaros and mustangs. Among them, a raggedy girl would be waiting there with her gaggle of outcasts, freckles splashed over her toffee brown skin.

"Stevie," she'd said the first time we met, with a touch of Georgia drawl. "You know, like Stevie Wonder?" she smelled of cigarettes. That scent of smoldering ash, bitter and stinging cool mint. It was heavenly.

I told her I didn't care and she laughed, calling me an asshole. That was nothing new, but I still thought about how good it would feel to sink my knuckles into her face. By the time I was seventeen I'd beaten up plenty of boys, never a girl. It was all of that tension building up at home finally getting out, set off as suddenly as my father's episodes.

"God, you're an idiot," he'd snarl after someone dropped a mug, or the scent of burnt flesh from meat left too long in the oven filled the house. It was always like that. Over little, insignificant things. Something always set him off. He'd enter a rage, and that fire lanced out to everyone around him. "You're such a goddamn idiot."

There was no reasoning with him when he was like that. When he screamed about Angels or stood in our front yard thinking he was somewhere else. Like those hurricanes back on the east coast, we just had to wait for the storm to roll over.

Sometimes mother caught the worst of it and chose to fight back, even if it only made things worse. So sometimes I never went back after school. Sometimes I didn't listen to music, and just stayed on the bus, looking back at Stevie as she wrote on the backrest with a sharpie, scribbling hearts and secret messages. Leaning across the aisle, she told me she was wearing a thong, indulging in a cruel delight when I blushed. It shouldn't have bothered me so much, but it did, and I hated her for being able to get under my skin so easily.

Out by the baseball field where I dreamed of skimming along the coast, I watched as she pressed her ass next to me against the chain fence, blowing smoke in my eyes. She said she'd never seen me smile before. In her hand was a pack of Marlboros, a bud waiting to be plucked from the pack. My mother's old threats rang from a world away, but I took it anyway. Stevie was close enough I could imagine how soft her hoodie would feel, or her neck as I buried my face in her fleshy, sour-sweet aroma.

I tossed the cigarette and told her to leave, and she did so with a string of insults, all of which explicitly claimed I was gay.

On the way home, down unpaved roads riddled with cacti, I filled a plastic bag with prickly pears, purple and ripe. I sat them in a pot of hot water, letting the needle spines stab into my palms as I rubbed them off the stubborn fruit. Mother told me to wear gloves, and I couldn't reason why that angered me. I ended up throwing the pears away, unopened and bare. I spent the rest of the night digging thorns from my fingers.

Stevie came back, all smarmy smiles again. Why? Why did she bother? All the taunts and jibes on the bus home, always putting herself in my space. Why was it so hard to hate her?

She turned me around, her arms on either side of my head. She was about as tall as me. A cactus stretched over us, its arms up in surrender, or perhaps it was reaching for the sun. I could see her jaw clench as she inched closer, something fierce and all at once wounded letting itself through her eyes, which I had never bothered to take a good look at. They weren't just dark brown, but black, touched with hidden flecks of pale gold.

I imagined moving to grab her, to take her hips in my hands. Her dry, cracked lips were so close I could taste the menthol on her tongue. I hesitated, and didn't realize I'd been holding onto the fence so tight.

By my head, her fingers cinched the metal links together and she asked, "Who'd want to kiss you anyway?"

What must she have felt when I shoved her? I'm sure the spines of the cactus must have stung as they dug into her shoulder, and the ground chalky and hard as she fell. I had a moment to feel it, like I'd just caught a falling steel beam on my arms, the impending weight of loathing and loneliness. So much passed through her, contorting her expression so that only her anger and hatred were at all translatable.

Later, out behind the bleachers, I dug my fingers into my stomach. Dragging them deep until I had ugly, bleeding tears of skin.

At home, the curtains were drawn and the air felt ill. My mother stood on the stairs, the glaring light spilling in from behind setting her in shadow and draping her shoulders in the colors of harvest. She didn't notice me, only watched the door to her room where my father surely sat.

I thought of how I'd pushed Stevie into that cactus. I thought of my father's anger.

I wondered if the war had really made him this way, or if it was just him.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** next chapter will be up sometime next week. Probably. Looking back on some of the more recent installments, there's definitely stuff I want to change/cut out, but for now I think they serve their purpose. One day I'll come back and make some things a little more cohesive. Have to finish this first. Chapters have never felt as far away as these last seven.


	25. Chapter 13: December 15

**Chapter 13: December 15**

Not a moment after ringing the bell, little feet stampede down the hall, and there's Nina – swinging the front door open.

"Hi, Kazuya! Welcome home!"

It seems I've been expected.

"Uh, hey," I say, glancing to the driveway. Past my rental truck, dad's car is there – mother's is not. Then the girl's words register. "This isn't my house."

Nina tilts her head, reminding me of an owl. "But isn't this where your mom and dad live?"

"Yes."

"Then it's your home."

I don't have more than a second to sputter, before the conversation is already over for her. "Grandpa Shinji! Kazuya's here!" she shouts, skipping down the hall and allowing me in. Even now the form of address doesn't sound quite right, since it's difficult to imagine my father as anyone's grandpa. I wave away just the thought of it, too absurd to entertain. What kind of grandfather would he be anyway? Would I even want my child to know him?

 _Since when have you ever considered one of those?_

The house is just the way I left it, though there's no reason it should have changed in only two weeks. The winds have picked up outside, shivering gusts cut off as I close the front door. Something rattles in the kitchen, but the hallway is still, dust particles drifting down the stairs through rays of window light.

The walls don't feel like they're closing in as I walk into the living room, and the Throne – a huge red leather chair – is in its usual place. Except Nina is tucked between its cushions, a coloring book atop her folded legs. The kingdom has been usurped. Plates clatter as my father stacks them away, the cupboard to his right open. A new smell slithers into my nose, not of musk or dry cat, but of rose and spice. He's brewing coffee, and I take another whiff – something French? Latin American? Close, but this one is distinct – light and airy like the sea.

"Your mother will be back this afternoon," he says, and I didn't realize I was staring. A thought to move tickles my muscles, but I stay where I am on the other side of the bar. He sets another plate away.

"Bourbon?" I ask.

He turns halfway, and I think that might be a slight smirk. He nods. "From Réunion."

I huff. A French island just off Madagascar. Premium coffee that I've had only once before, but will never forget. Sweet and chocolaty without all of the heavy aftertaste. I'll have to sneak a cup of it later.

"Hey, that looks like my daddy's jacket!" Nina crawls her way across the couch to where I'm standing, her fingers brushing over the silver star and bar on my shoulder. "His doesn't have the flag on it either."

It's probably the same with any other ex-JSSDF that managed to hold on to those things. I guess back then, no Jerry wanted to be caught with anything that might be considered nationalistic. There were 50 million of them in a society that didn't want them and didn't particularly know what to do with them. If they couldn't see the flags and the half-remembered festivals, then all the easier to forget about them.

"Nina, show Kazuya upstairs." my father says, his back to us. She nods and leaps off the couch, trying to climb the steps two by two.

I pause at the base of the stairs, by the baluster where my hands once steadily wore away at the paint over the years. Nina's already made it to the top and I start to ascend, the boards creaking with each step. I thought that when I came here, my nerves would be on fire, and it would feel like the mountains were rolling over me again. No such feeling comes, but neither do I feel any comfort from such a familiar place. It is empty, alien.

"They let me stay in your room whenever I have to sleep over," Nina says, the door groaning as she enters, twirling over the dark wood floors and humming a nameless tune.

I've taken a step back in time, to another boy's room, when he was nineteen and angry at the world. Dark blue curtains and bed sheets, walls unadorned but marked with a few streaks and the occasional dent. There are an array of tools on the desk by his bed, where he used to toy with old watches and their cogs, in love with the oil of their metals and how they clicked and whirled when put together just right. On my left are the bifold closet doors, within which he would hide and draw childish pictures of a happier, made up family.

"You can sleep here," Nina says, having already made it somewhat her own. She grabs a purple backpack from the bed. "Grandpa set up a place for me to sleep on the couch in the office. I don't mind. It smells like mine at home."

"Don't you have any family here in Arizona, Nina?" I ask, setting my bag down.

She shrugs. "No, they all live in different countries now. The ones in Japan don't talk to my daddy anymore."

Nina leads me back down stairs and I find myself hoping she isn't lonely, hoping she has friends at school or a mother she can talk to.

My father has finished the dishes and sits at the table. That aroma hits me again, making my mouth water. This time, an orange cat sits on the backrest of the couch, awaiting our return. Nina rubs her nose against his and he purrs, sliding his cheek along hers.

"Why don't you take Myshka out hunting?" father asks. Her pigtails bounce as she nods, hefting Myshka up in her arms. She lets the tabby rest over her shoulder as they venture outside. I know she doesn't mind being by herself on occasion and even prefers that from time to time. At least all the cat asks of her is scratches under his chin.

"He brought me a cardinal yesterday," dad says, the sun-glare on his glasses hiding an eye. I wasn't sure what I would do once I got here. I also hadn't considered that I might be alone with my father for more than five minutes. Or perhaps I did and just didn't want to think about it. So I contemplate going outside to watch Nina, or returning upstairs and keeping to my old room. That's when I spot a cup of swirling coffee ringed in gold at the seat across from him, a glazed doughnut sitting beside it. Quite the bribe.

 _Isn't this what you came here to do anyway?_

I sit and try to sip at the bourbon coffee like it's something I have everyday, and not like just the taste of it brings back a thousand bright memories that warm me from head to toe. We sit quietly, while my father watches Nina and Myshka play in his garden, the sunset reflecting off his glasses. A hand fingers the ends of an envelope, squished beneath a brown leather bound book, unmarked and frayed at the edges. Then I realize – I've seen it before. It's the same one from the hospital, when I came down to visit mom.

"What's that?" I ask, making a lazy gesture.

He looks confused, and then a little embarrassed. Hesitating, he takes the envelope and stows it away under the table, before leaning forward on his elbows. "A journal I used to keep. Just started writing in it again the past few years."

"Can I read it?" I ask before I can fully think it through, expecting him to say no and to get defensive. Another tripwire snagged.

He stares at it for a time. A tension knots itself in the polished wood. His hand settles over the cover, brushing with something intimate. After a rough, bloated pause, he nods. "Yeah... sure."

He pushes it across to me and there's a strange sort of reverence when I take it, keeping it close to me on the table. I'm tempted to open the ancient tome and read its scriptures now, but that would be impolite, and a private sort of thing I imagine neither of us would like to be in the same room to share. So what should I talk about? Should I ask some more about the war? It's different now that I'm sitting here with him. I was at a much safer distance while in Washington.

I drum my fingers on the table. Stop – hold them in a fist. Then a glance at the envelope in his lap. "I can help you write your book, you know."

At first, he is little more than surprised, and even seems to consider it for a minute. "I have to take a look at my old journals. You've got one of them. There's only a few pages left."

The windows rattle as we fall into silence again, dead leaves skittering over the house. I have emptied my mug and finished half of my doughnut when the front door creaks open, and my mother steps in.

"Hey, welcome home," I say and she stops, eyes wide. Her expression falls away to something unreadable and I shift when she only stares at me. Didn't she know I was coming today? Then, the spell broken, she looks away and wipes a sleeve over her mouth and sniffs, muttering something about changing before walking off to her room without a second glance.

I look to my father for explanation and he only smiles.

When she comes back, her arms enclose me from behind, hair tickling the back of my neck. She sighs, more content than I've ever known her to be, and I think of reaching up and grabbing her arms to keep her there.

She steps away before I can and the moment is gone. As she moves aside, I see that she hasn't actually changed at all and takes the chair between us, stealing a few sips from my dad's mug. She tells me she was sorry to hear about me and Marina. I shrug, pretending not to be annoyed.

"We just weren't right for each other," I say.

Mom crosses her legs. "I knew you could do better anyway," she says and I'm not sure whether to be happy or offended. I decide on both. My father chuckles and shakes his head, as if to say, _that's not what he wants to hear_.

She bristles a bit at this and ripostes by drinking the last of his coffee.

The light in our kitchen is not amiable like in Harry's bar, nor is it unpleasant like my dreary apartment up north. It's new and somewhere in-between. As it starts to get dark out, a red-cheeked Nina returns with Myshka, who leaves a dead baby snake at my feet. _You are so skinny boy, surely you must be stupid and cannot hunt for yourself. Eat, stupid boy._

Conversation is strained, but as dinner is being made, Nina talks plenty for all of us. She's learning about elephants at school. Unstoppable when set on a path, with large ears for them to hear more than speak. I ask her who told her elephants could speak.

"Not with their mouths, silly," she pokes her nose, "but with their trunks." she goes on to tell us they make other sounds people can't hear, some that can only be detected by other elephants from miles and miles away.

With dinner finished, Nina and I clean the dishes. I wash, she dries.

Exhaustion weighs on my ribs and pulls at my eyes, even though I've done nothing but sit at a table with my parents and indulge in strangled small talk. Except now I'm feeling the tremors of a queasy stomach. I decide to head to bed early.

On the way up, I argue it must be the jet-lag again, since I don't have Marina's soup to blame this time. At the second floor, I turn to see my mother at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the railing. As with the hallway earlier, she stares, more relaxed than tense this time. A calm, breathing moment that makes me feel a toddler, even standing so high up.

"Uh, night, mom," I say.

She smiles. "Goodnight, Kazuya."

I stay up for another hour, thirty minutes of which are spent staring at the weathered journal in my hands. I decide to open to a random page to start, a few stains marring the paper.

There is no date, save for a scrawled _2035_ in the upper corner –

 _I go to his room and open the door, watching over him for a while. Just to make sure I haven't actually strangled our son. Just to make sure I'm not the monster my dreams tell me I am. He's inherited my jaw, his mother's chin and a bit of her nose too. His eyes, though... I know somehow he's gotten those from my father._

 _I'm going back to bed now. Asuka is still asleep. I've gotten pretty good at not waking her. She doesn't sleep so well anymore, and I think Kazuya knows it._

 _He shouldn't have to live like this._

 _He doesn't deserve it._

* * *

The next day, mother takes a quick trip up to Mesa to approve some new procedures at the lab, while dad and I take Nina home in my rental. She doesn't live far. Her mother greets us at the door, wide hips and wavy hair.

On the way back to the house, I want to ask him about the journal. I want to ask him about the boy he dreams about strangling, or the eyes of his father he can't seem to escape. I stared at them in the mirror this morning, as if imbued with a new, sinister glint. My Grandfather commanded his son out against foreign, cosmic monstrosities and broke everything anyone ever thought they understood about the world. I have no pictures of him. Or, rather, I've never seen one of him.

I had trailed a hand down my face, wondering if somehow I'd taken more than just his eyes.

In the end, nothing comes of it and while 94.9 blurbs some disjointed 2020's pop, I resolve to read more of the journal. Just thinking about it, I realize how much stronger my father is than me – to let me in like that, even after all we've said to one another in the past. To give me his most private thoughts and let me so casually peruse them, judge them. To judge him.

I don't think I've ever thought of my father as brave up until now. I know I should be ashamed of that.

We've barely spoken all morning. He shifts, restless, and drums his fingers wherever they end up. Once home, he heads out back to the garden and I have the feeling he expects me to follow. We stand out by the azaleas and his bundles of roses, their leaves brittle and brown from the winter chill.

My father speaks first. "I've got six or seven years, at most," he says. From his jacket, he pulls out a fold of papers from the envelope I saw, holding them out to me.

I start to reach for them. "What is it?"

"An assisted death directive. If the dementia gets worse, you have power of attorney."

My hand stops and the winds may as well be daggers.

"If I start to meet certain conditions, then eventually you can take me up to Saint Luke's and a physician will hand me a loaded syringe, and that'll be that. But by then I... I wouldn't be functioning very well, if at all."

I keep my arms at my sides, heat pulsing through me despite the numbing chill. "I don't understand."

 _What the fuck._

"I want you to promise me that... if I really start to go, if I really start to lose it, I want you to make sure they give me that damned needle. Your mother might try and fight it, but I don't want her taking care of me, not like that. She's done that enough."

 _What the_ _ **fuck**_ _, dad_ _?_

"Don't talk like that."

"Promise me."

Those eyes have turned hard, and it sounds more like a command than a request. Right now, I'm a soldier being given an order, not a choice.

"No, I'm _not_ –"

He grabs my upper arm, shoving the papers into my palm. Father the soldier is gone just as suddenly, or replaced, or forgotten in place of Shinji Soryu, a man who has dementia and is so scared of losing his mind a second time he's willing to snap the little threads of a relationship he has left with his son.

"Kazuya," his gaze drops and he purses his lips, grip tightening. "Just... just promise me, alright?"

For a while, there's only the clatter of the leaves and even that falls still, until there's only the howling of Arizona's winds rushing through the mountains and valleys. I imagine, at least a dozen times over, decking him and telling him to just–

To just what? What is it I want from him? This sting, this anger, it isn't hate. I know that too well, and I know that this is something different. If the journal was a hand offered in peace, then these papers are the other holding a gun, punching a bullet through my gut.

I tear my arm free, papers crumpling in a fist. "Fine. But I'm not going to lie to mom. Sure as hell not for you." his shoulders slump, and I'm the one who looks away this time. "You've got to tell her, sooner or later."

The weariness in his next words plows deeper than any bullet. "Then let it be later, son."

I can't believe what I'm hearing. Not a word of it. I thought I'd embraced this already. The fact that my father has dementia and... this makes it all so much different. He's put the gun in my hand now. _Am I supposed to make that decision easily when the time comes? Do you think I of all people must be okay with you dying? Is that why you gave this to me?_

I don't have very long to ponder. A voice heavy with authority makes us both turn and I feel a child again, caught doing something I shouldn't.

"Why are you having Kazuya make promises when you can't keep your own?" mother asks, stepping from around the tall, brittle azaleas mere feet away, her arms crossed. I wonder how long she's been listening. Her gaze could melt steel and I can't help but be thankful it isn't aimed at me. She's fixated so intensely on my father, I may as well not be here.

"Asuka..."

His plea falls on deaf ears. "What about _our_ agreement?"

"We were just kids," he says and steps forward, arms open.

She takes shuffling steps back, hurt in her eyes. "Do you even remember?"

Always goes for the stab, no mercy. She's probably known about the dementia for as long as he has. The Soryu men have never been very good at keeping secrets. Not from her.

Despite the low blow, he manages a smirk, and closes the distance between them. "I'm not that bad yet."

"After all this time I– I can't believe you're– that you're still this–" she hits his chest with the side of her fist, "this _stupid_!" she hits him again. He catches her wrist before the third strike, and her other hand latches onto his.

"I know, I know. I thought that..." he takes her hands in his, feeling the ridges of her knuckles. He makes sure their eyes meet. "We'll go together. Just you and me, okay?" he says, mirth coloring his tone as he tries again for a smile, but she doesn't return it.

The air between them bleeds. Another argument, silent and much older, happening in that small, wounded space. Eventually, she slides her hands free. "You're a jerk."

We both watch her turn and leave, soon slamming the back door shut. The sound echoes over our hilly tundra, which I'm convinced has gotten a few degrees colder.

"Dad... what is she talking about?"

He sighs, staring after her. "After Third Impact... well, we didn't have much to hope for back in the camps. We didn't have anything. We decided that, if we were going to die... we'd die together. I didn't think she took it seriously. Not anymore, at least. We were just kids."

I flinch, remembering the papers still clutched in my hand.

A promise to die together.

My father once made me promise to take care of his flowers if anything ever happened to him, but it looks like their stalks have already started to turn gray again.


	26. Chapter 14: December 17

**Chapter 14: December 17**

The morning is burdened, strained tight on the arresting wires of our sinking aircraft carrier. Dad makes breakfast, but leaves none for himself and heads outside early without a word to my mother, who has seen fit to pretend he doesn't exist.

I had forgotten how much I hate this.

So we eat in silence and listen to the wind rattle the panes. She makes noncommittal, one word answers when I comment on Nina or ask about Misato's bar, _Unryū_ , though she doesn't make eye contact. It's at this point I realize I'm grinding my teeth together, subconsciously trying to keep from being completely pissed off at her, which comes welling up in full bloom. I've never been able to stand this side of her. She can't seriously be angry at me, can she? What did I do but acquiesce to an ailing man's request?

Why does she have to shut me out like this?

Mother leaves the table and settles on the couch, not looking at all relaxed or comfortable as she flicks the TV on. It's one of the channels that still broadcasts black and white movies with chipped audio and soap opera drama. This one has a woman in her father's garden, standing by a poisonous plant that kills anyone who touches it. Not her, though. She's made from the same cells as the plant, so anyone that touches her dies of the plant's poison too.

I step over to the couch, hesitating when she only stares at the TV. I decide it's safe to sit down on the other end. My anger has never gotten me anywhere with my mother in the past. I thought it would hurt less to fight her, not knowing what a burden it was to hurt her back. Every time, though I resented it, I swallowed my pride and made it up to her, because one of us had to.

"Dad told me about the camps," I say, even though it's a lie. They've never spoken to me about the camps, but it sounds better than 'Dad told me you made a suicide pact'. She doesn't say anything. She always has something to say.

"You're not really going to go through with it, are you?" I ask.

Her gaze drifts to me, downcast, and that is answer enough. I wedge myself closer, nearly touching her. My body doesn't cooperate and I end up sitting my hands on my thighs, reliving those nights in Florida when I would beg her to stay and promise me that she'd never leave.

"You wouldn't stay, even for me?"

She makes a quiet, heartbroken noise, sullen as if a child being scolded. "I'll always stay for you," she says, placing her hand on mine. "I'm your mother."

Just the word, the sound of it, pulls her back from whatever dark abyss she was peering into. She's the only woman I know who can take strength from just a word, and draw herself back together, even when the glint in her topaz eyes is missing. I turn my hand over to take hers, placing the other atop it.

"Aren't there any treatments?" I ask. Last night I made some sorry excuses for research on the web. Under the 'treatments' tab was a blank space with a red-highlighted sentence that said – _help contribute to this stub!_ – but, "I've read about some new procedures being tested over in Spain."

Mother takes her hand back and sits straight. "They're still experimental – and not to mention unethical."

If it had been about anything else, I might have smiled at her posturing. There's a real edge in her voice, something bitter. The odd patchwork of procedures available vary widely depending on where you go and almost none of them are practiced in America. One talks about cloning and using some kind of memory backup apparatus, like people are spongy, walking computers. Another talks about regeneration, which apparently never manages to fully replace the atrophied lobes of the brain. But it _can_ work. Everything is there for it to work.

"Have you even looked into them?" I ask.

"No, Kazuya," she says, barking a laugh, "no, of course I wouldn't have researched a thousand different ways to stop the Dementia from slowly rotting at my husband's brain. Of course I haven't debated taking him to one of those experimental labs overseas a hundred times over so that they can use him up and throw him away – just for the chance that their experiments might _actually_ work."

I try not to take her scathing words to heart. It was a stupid question before I even formed the thought. She doesn't mean it, I know.

"What if they do?" I ask.

She shakes her head. "You don't understand. Those fools over in Zaragoza... what they want would do a lot of good for a lot of people, but the way they want to achieve it is selfish – and selfish people with the kind of knowledge they have always do harm."

"Does it really matter if there's a chance it'll make him better?"

"Of course it does," she snaps, though it comes out more as a sigh. "Even if we managed to regenerate the failing parts of his brain, those memories would already be gone."

I fold my hands together and look out the window, nerves bouncing in my legs. Here we have a real solution and she's turning away from it, making up excuses. Metaphysics has come a long way since my mother entered the field, how couldn't she support the very science she's taught and studied?

That's not even what it's really about. Not for her. There's more than just a disagreement with foreign ethics in her words, a history of heated arguments between colleagues – perhaps even former students.

I huff through my nose. If I'd paid more attention to it when I was younger, maybe then I would have something to contribute to this instead of asking more clueless questions. If I had become a professor like my mother wanted, maybe I could have helped him.

"I guess you're right," I say, following the rigid patterns of her burgundy plaid shirt. One button at the top is undone, where I see a golden cross. Her fingers rise up to touch it, its edges already rounded from years of idle worry.

"Can you imagine being able to live as only half the person you were before?" she asks and I shrug.

"Might be nice," I say. "Maybe make for a kind of fresh start."

"But he wouldn't be the same."

"Is that really so bad?"

"It is," she whispers.

In the movie, the girl's lover has been injected with the poisonous cells of the plant so that they can be together. But he is horrified by it and drinks an untested antidote that only ends up killing him instead. Stricken with grief, she drinks the antidote too – and they die together.

"I think he's tired," mom says, watching as the girl's father, maddened with anguish, grabs the toxic plant. There, the three of them make a ring of corpses around it, nothing left but pain and death to remember them by.

"So, what are you going to do?"

"I won't make him hang on. I just... after the war, your father was all I had. We weren't very happy at the time, but it was better than trying to face my family. They could never understand."

We sit for a while longer, watching the plight of Jaffrey Pyncheon, obsessed with the legend of treasure hidden within a house stolen by his family generations ago. His brother Clifford knows better, fighting those legends with slander against their thieving grandfathers.

"What a pity men must inherent their ancestor's ignorance instead of their wisdom!" he says, all pomp and bluster as he storms out.

Muttering something about taking a walk, and feeling just a tad guilty as mother reluctantly nods, I head out back. I don't like all this talk of my father dying like he's only got days instead of years. It makes me feel as though I'm running out of time too. Because, slowly, it's begun to dawn on me that I may never be able to wrap my head around the Angel War. That makes me feel guilty, because it means whatever my parents went through was more terrible than I can ever imagine.

I find him in middle of scraggly watermelon vines, a pair of cutters in his hand. He doesn't move to cut anything with them.

"She's still pretty steamed at you," I say, coming to stand a few feet away.

He nods. "She'll come around, when she's ready."

With a sigh, he stands, giving up on whatever meditation he was trying to achieve. He motions for me to follow, sitting down on the bottom back patio step. The one at the top suits me just fine. The cold isn't the bone-chilling freeze it was yesterday, and is the more pleasant balance of frost and warmth I'm fond of.

"Did your mom ever tell you you used to visit her?" my father asks, staring over the crops. "Before she got pregnant?"

He's feeling reminiscent today. I can't hold back a scoff. "Come on, dad. What the hell does that even mean?"

"I'm serious." he throws a glance over his shoulder, tapping the cutters to his forehead. "She used to say it was like she could feel someone touching her thoughts before she slept – making her smile even when she didn't feel like it." he turns to the garden and makes a satisfied nod. "You made her smile _a lot_."

"Well, I don't remember her smiling much when I was a kid."

" _I_ remember," he says, indignant. "Even got a little jealous for a while. When you came along it was like you'd stolen her love from me. You were tough competition and I couldn't compete. Never had a chance." I can hear the grin in his voice. The brown sunflower stalks sway and the villa creaks. Myshka comes padding up, laying down between my father's feet. "She never wanted kids, you know," he says, quieter. "Get pissed off if we even talked about it, which wasn't often anyway."

I did know, in a way. Mommy's Happy Accident, after all.

He sighs and leans on his knees. "So she took it in stride when the doctors told her not to get her hopes up. She'd been spending the years before that convincing herself she didn't want kids, which was mostly true. Spent the ones up until you were born telling herself it could never happen anyway." when he looks back at me, dreams from days that seem lifetimes ago come with that dizzying haze of deja vu. When he would stand by the house with that adoration brimming from every inch of his being, a glimpse of Shinji Soryu before the Eva destroyed our home. "You made her pretty damn happy, Kazuya."

A few questions fight to blurt out, yearning for more, but I keep them to myself in that pleasant pause between us, which quickly becomes choked. IIf only I could be more like Myshka and communicate with purrs and claws and be understood.

"What about you, dad?" I ask before the moment can slip away. "Did I make you happy? Did I make you proud?"

"You've always made me proud," he mutters.

I shake my head, despite the hope stirring there. "Yeah, big screw up in the CIA shuffling paperwork."

"Well... you wanted to help people, right? Be apart of something bigger?"

"That was part of it, I guess."

He grunts. "That's more than I ever did. I got into the Eva because I felt like they made me. I didn't do it for anything noble. I did it because it was what they wanted me to do. Because I felt guilty."

"Mom said you fought Angels to protect people."

"That was always a part of it. In reality, I was never that selfless about it. Not until it was too late."

Thinking back to when I was fourteen and how daunting and confusing the world was, even if it wasn't normal, or very functional, I had a family and home and return to. My dad lost his mother and from what I know of his father, I'm not sure that they were ever very close.

My father didn't have anything.

"I mean... you were just a kid, right?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says with a wry chuckle. "Just a stupid kid fighting a war he didn't know a thing about."

"Well... I don't think I could have done that."

Dad doesn't respond and another patient pause stretches between, while he picks peeling rubber from the handles of his clippers.

There were stories they used to tell us in college, about how Africa used to be before Third Impact. A man comes to a village and shoots a boy's mother. He shoves an assault rifle into his hands and says, "Go. Go and fight or else your tribe will die."

The UN just dressed it up with uniforms and a cause.

Shaking his head, my father stands and I'm starting to get used to seeing that smirk on his face. His hand grips my shoulder as he climbs the steps, giving it a squeeze before sliding away, Myshka right at his heels. The air is sweet and fresh in my lungs and for a time Arizona doesn't look quite so dismal and forsaken. I have skipped lunch and the sun has started its descent towards Kitt Peak before I feel the inclination to head back in.

On my old nightstand, his journal rests. After today it no longer feels difficult to read. Yes, it's hard to go through the struggles outlined on every page, but I am eager to do it now. I'm repaying a debt by getting to know my father this way, by delving into all of the things he is not ready to relive again.

As I progress, he doesn't talk about the beaches quite so much, doesn't write about going there in the middle of the night and sitting on the dunes, entertaining the vague notion of swimming out into the dark waters with the tide. Nor does he write about the trivialities of his old jobs, the hard stares and snide remarks. Treated less like some second class citizen and more akin to a sick murderer of children who doesn't deserve to walk among free men.

No, these last ten pages have been barren, sometimes just a word or two and rarely more than a paragraph. There's a long period where he doesn't write in it at all, until I find a page with just one sentence, no date, scribbled as if just the effort of writing it was too much.

 _I saw him again tonight. He was sitting in the chair across the room, throat slit open, and he smiled at me._

He's mentioned this other boy before. I know it's not me, as I'm usually mentioned by name or as 'my son'. There's a tangible guilt pressed into the paper on these entries, just one of the many things that has stayed with my father after all these years.

We're up in the attic today, rifling through dusty boxes looking for some of his older journals. On the ladder below I plan out a script to a one-act play where I ask him about the boy he crushes or strangles.

Up here it's dark, moldy and far too dusty for my nose's liking. A pair of flashlights stand on the floor at our feet, casting a firelight glow into the rafters and chasing the wolf spiders to their hideaways, where they watch us with insect disinterest.

Dad throws aside another box, full of old shoes. We're trying to find the books he used to keep back when they still lived in Boston. The next box he grabs, its packing tape untouched, seems to be the one we're after. He slides a razor over the top and I get the heady feeling of cracking open a time capsule, like we're a pair of archaeologists happening upon long lost religious texts.

There are drawings in some of these too. They depict things I've only heard second-hand accounts of from the cult worshipers out in Cali and parts of China, the things their churches call Lilith and Adam and Eva. They are something I would expect from a child's mind instead of a man in his early twenties.

I forget the script and ask, "Who was he?"

Tugging free a black, faceless book from the mess, he brushes some dust away and parts its stiff pages. He's been expecting this question.

"The records said he was the Fifth Child," he says. "Another pilot like us. That was a lie... I didn't know that until later."

His focus is possessed by the old journal. He's searching for something, grazing each page as if touching the memories themselves.

"What happened to him?" I ask.

My father's hands stop on a worn page that was ripped in half at some point and then taped back together. There's no shiver or emotion as, in a small breath, he says, "I killed him."

It's no one I recognize, not from any articles or news paper clippings, but clearly it's someone my father knew. The drawing isn't a master piece, though I get the sense of a lithe boy with long, messy hair. Only one part of it is colored – the eyes. They're a harsh crimson.

"Seventeenth," he says, tapping the paper. "It was him. The Sixteenth Angel was the one that killed Rei. Kaworu... _he_ was the Seventeenth."

If he wasn't captured by the drawing, he might have caught my shoulders jerking, or my eyes widening. I'm glad he isn't looking at me. Weren't the Angels supposed to be monsters? How could they have ever looked like us? For my father, the way he talks about this boy in his journal, how he's holding that frail, abused drawing now. That wasn't some enemy to be destroyed. Not to him.

"Foolish, isn't it? That I could forget something like that." he opens his right hand, staring at his bare palm. When it starts to quiver, he turns it over and smears his flesh over the led, blurring the picture. "I used to lie awake at night thinking 'It should've been me'."

"I'm glad," I say, stuttering. "T-that it wasn't you, I mean. I'm glad."

He nods, barely, and stares down at the picture. Then he closes the journal and makes something of a chuckle. "Yeah. Me too."

The boxes are packed away again and we leave the wolf spiders to attend their silent vigil over this somber domain, where all secrets and memories forgotten are kept.

That evening my mother and father make amends, in that strangely quiet and honest way of theirs. I am eight years old again, watching them from down the hall through a cracked door.

"Don't you trust me?" she asks, sitting so that their knees touch. She is harder than iron and stone, but with his hand on her knee, my father melts all that away.

"Of course I do. You know I do."

The way he looks at her carries the weight of his words more than his voice ever could, and speaks so deeply of their bond. She places her hand on his and he lifts it to plant a gentle kiss on her knuckles. A soft smirk comes free.

"I might hate you more... but I suppose I won't love you any less," she says.

I think it's meant as a joke, one shared only between them. Yet there's always a little bit of truth in everything we say. He smiles, truly smiles, and takes her in his arms while she clings to his shirt. Later, when I check on them, they will have fallen asleep on the couch together and I will go to bed as well, a younger part of myself more content with this old house.

For now, I sit in my room and read more of dad's journal. His entries are sporadic and not often dated, leaving me to do the guesswork and making me feel a bit like a case worker again.

For this entry, there is no guessing.

 _I picked him up. He looked into my eyes, I looked into his – and we stayed that way for a long time, just staring at each other. That's when I knew. From that minute on I knew I'd gone through my whole life to reach this very moment. I'd gone through hell and terror, just to meet him._

 _My son._

 _Is it wrong of me to be scared of him? I've always told Asuka that I would never trust myself as a father. But when he looks at me with those bright, curious eyes... it's like I've got two hearts beating in my chest. There's this whole new life in my hands and it makes me believe that I can be a good man for once._

 _I want to be that man more than anything._

 _For him._


	27. Chapter 15: December 19

**Chapter 15: December 19**

"I don't think this is a good idea," I say, belatedly catching the volume of my voice and glancing back at the girl in the next room, still pleasantly oblivious.

"Why?" mother asks. "Nina likes you."

"But _I_ don't like kids."

"Neither did I once," she says, pinching my cheek. She gives a wan smile when I smack her hand away. "Sometimes I still don't."

"She's old enough to watch herself."

"I might agree, but your father has a session up at the VA today and I have another _useless_ board meeting that requires my physical presence. The Satsuma's trust us to take care of her." and there is that air of finality I've never heeded. Beyond her, past the open door and the front porch, my father is leaning against her corvette, the black journal we found yesterday held at his side.

"They shouldn't rely on other people to do that."

"Why are you making such a big deal out of this?" she asks, crossing her arms.

Another protest half-baked as reason curls up and dies before I can speak it. After a drawn out minute under glaring morning light barbed with irritation, my mother gathers up her purse and manages to look more exasperated than annoyed. _My boy_. Her sigh and slight grimace seem to say. _My strange, troublesome boy_.

"It's not going to kill you to look after a _nine-year-old_ until four o'clock," she says and I roll my eyes, wishing I hadn't. How easily we fall into old routines.

She touches my shoulder to call my attention, and at least there's a gentleness to her tone as she says, "Take her into the city, go out and get some sun for once – you're so pale."

"You're one to talk," I grumble. She's set me off balance again. "I distinctly remember you having a tan when I was younger."

"Such a sweet boy, always reminding his mother just how old she is," she pinches my cheek again and, for good measure, digs her nails in this time.

" _Ow_." jerking back, her hand is gone before I can even think of smacking it, a scowl following her out the door and burrowing into it after she leaves.

At least she isn't so quiet and distant today, which has become an all too familiar occurrence since we've started talking again. No, this morning at least, she's only her usual levels of standoffish and irritable. That's good. Rather difficult to communicate with than sullen and depressed.

Besides, my mother is, what has also been a trend since I was old enough to comprehend the word _rivalry_ , right. How she would gloat if she ever had access to such thoughts, which is why I will never speak them. It is in silence that I will accept that there is nothing unreasonable about what she has asked of me today. As if it's really so inconvenient looking after a child, even if it is someone else's.

I just wish there had been more warning.

"Sorry," Nina says when I turn around, standing there with her hands behind her back. "I don't mean to be a burden."

The guilt is instant and heart-crushing.

"No, it's just..." I rub the back of my neck. "I didn't think you'd like being around someone like me."

"What do you mean?" she asks in her owlish way. She said once that we were the same, and seemed pleased enough by that, having found such a rare commonality in someone. I suppose she even thought we were friends, in a way.

I shrug, mouth twitching. "I'm not a very nice person."

Nina returns the gesture, her long hair, not bound in its usual pigtails, swaying. "Everyone is mean every once in a while. That doesn't make you not-nice," she says and smiles, childishly blissful at the flip of a switch as she steps forward to take one of my hands in her smaller pair. "I think you're really nice."

I lift an eyebrow. "You've only met me two times."

"So?!" she balks, even pouting a little. "I can tell."

Her hands bounce mine to punctuate her claim and I pull it away, putting on a practiced smile. Nina's just a little kid, with eyes like mine, but what does she know? How could she understand? She'll learn one day. In a few years, she'll grow up and she'll see that people aren't good just because you believe it or pray hard enough. Today, she'll see that I'm no different and will look at me like she's looking at me now, confused, and maybe a little hurt.

We stand at odds in the hallway, while Myshka sits patiently at the far end and watches.

"Well, what do you want to do?" I ask, almost hiding a sigh.

Nina pokes her lips and peers at Myshka. "Usually I go with _Abuela_ to Mesa, or I help Grandpa in the garden."

"Abuela?"

Nina smiles and snickers. "Asuka doesn't like it when I call her Grandma. So I told her Abuela means Auntie," she says, so impishly delighted by her own cleverness.

Despite being in the heart of winter, and the snows that coat the desert mountains, I can feel a familiar heat seeping in through the windows.

"How about a swim?" I ask.

"Okay!" Nina jumps and runs upstairs to gather her things. It's still too cold to use our pool here. We'll have to go elsewhere.

I drive us down to the Sportsplex in south Tucson near Las Vistas, passing by the old Restoration Center; built in the Post Second Impact era when eco-systems had died out globally and scientists dedicated their lives to repairing the damage they'd done. Now it's a tourist attraction.

Of the complex's ten baseball diamonds, three of them have games running. Nina says she and her dad sometimes come here to watch the local teams compete, making bets on players.

"I've only lost once," she says, complaining that he still owes her two-hundred dollars from the last bout.

It's near Littletown, which began as a tiny host of suburbs that stretched its legs into a largely Japanese extension of Tucson, touching boarders with the Indian reservation and an abandoned open pit mine where they used to hold festivals. About 39% of Arizona's demographic is Japanese nowadays. Dad once said it was higher before we moved out here.

"They all wanted to get east," he said. "Get away from the camps and into the dirt-cheap ghettos where there was work and a slightly lower chance of getting stabbed or robbed."

The place started as a JRRI settlement and was put together by a classroom of schizophrenic five-year-olds. Living complexes were little more than giant prefab blocks stacked atop one another – cargo containers furnished for people. As more buildings were erected, more roadways and support structures had to be knocked down, expanded – and knocked down again. The interiors became a tight, claustrophobic maze of cramped, narrow hallways that always seem to be in a state of disrepair. While the streets and alleys turned into an extension of this cluttered, disorganized layout, spawning an intricate network of smoke-filled bars and gang-riddled parking garages.

They called it _Chīsai_ and most of American-bred Tucson kept it out of sight and out of mind for a while. Jerry settlements had developed a stigma for being cultish, even though Third Impact fanaticism had spanned across all races and cultures.

Out here, the hustle and bustle of the crowds by the fields and the indecipherable words of the announcers over the loud speakers takes me back to when Misato brought me into Littletown. It was to see one of their festivals, in the years they still bothered to have them before the Migrant Rush to the homeland.

The city council had decided it would be beneficial for the 'preservation of Japanese culture' to hold the annual traditions that had, up until then, been celebrated in the provinces of their birth. They agreed upon the _Gion Matsuri_ , though most of the younger Jerries couldn't tell you what that was or why it was important, any hard meaning lost as it quickly turned into a mish-mash of regions itching to adhere to their particular brand of provincial piety.

Eventually, it simply became the _Rikōru-sai_. The Recalling Festival.

There were no temples to offer reverence to the Shinto gods, very few priests and almost no shrine maidens, much to the resentment of the older generation.

" _This is Japan,_ " the festival said. " _What is left of it._ "

The stair-like tiers of the mine were lined with glowing paper lanterns and girls draped in green, pink and purple kimonos. People dressed as Samurai rode horses down into the pits where the food stalls were and, in some gaping hole dug out for industry in Arizona, reenacted the Fourth Battle of Kanawakajima with plastic sets of lamellar armor painstakingly corded and sewn together in sand-riddled homes.

It was our very own coliseum.

Most of Littletown gathered in the morning and the men, lacking in traditional garb and settling for no shirts and white headbands, pulled giant wooden floats that rolled on wheels six feet around. Often they would get stuck in the sand and extra runners were needed to lay down wooden slats ahead of them. A grueling task, but an honored one. The floats were decorated with tapestries and lanterns while singers and flute players danced on top of them.

A boy no older than me at the time ran down the sand ramp barefoot and climbed up the largest float, where he drew a sword twice his size and cut a rope as thick as my leg in one stroke. The dirt slopes shook with bells and cheering as the _Matsuri_ began in earnest.

A fat-faced stall worker said a Magister used to pick a son from the merchant families to be dressed in Shinto robes and isolated away from the city for weeks undergoing purifying ceremonies in the temples. On the way to the float, he rode on horseback and was not allowed to touch the ground, though the worker couldn't recall why. Something about a Phoenix, he said, handing me a skewer of charcoal grilled chicken doused in sweet sauce.

More floats passed by and women Misato told me were from Morioka danced behind them, thumping and clacking their drums and singing in a nasally, drawn out way. Their faces were painted white, eyes lined in black mascara and lips dabbed with crimson, ghostly figures that moved as if in a trance. The intonation of their hymn, high and ethereal in presence, rang clear and chilling alongside the bells. To me, it seemed they were casting a spell over all of Arizona.

A boy escorting a mock Shinto shrine, walking with a swagger that was half arrogance and half the fanned out shoulders of his haori, tried to explain it. His dialect was one I could barely discern but the tale, from what I gathered, involved a legend about a demon and a place called Iwate.

The city-goers of Tucson, those that were little enough to remember climbing out of the _Rikōru-sai's_ dusty coliseum, will explain such stories to outsiders and, in just as many broad strokes, splash together a blurred painting of Pima County, where people practice a cultural reverence that is neither American, nor Hispanic, nor Japanese nor Indian.

So for some, Kino Sportsplex is a place grounded in the old and familiar.

Changing inside, I find we are the only ones making use of the heated indoor pool, far too large for just two people. Nina, having a moment ago been so excited to wear her purple one-piece with the pink butterflies, pensively regards the veritable ocean.

I curse my mother for the third time in a day.

She was hesitant to come out of the changing room too, turning the last thirty minutes into an awkward, half-hearted bit of coaxing on my part. In the end, it was her own resolve more than anything I said that got her standing here now.

Nina sits at the edge and dips her legs in, swaying side to side, pensive still. Sitting beside her, I catch a discoloration lapping on the surface where her legs swing. Blinking, I realize the yellow splotches are on the skin of her shins and thighs.

"What happened to your legs?" I ask.

Nina stops kicking her feet and draws them back, perhaps thinking I might forget if I can't see.

"I was... burning stuff outside with nail polish yesterday and... daddy yelled at me," she says. "I didn't mean to make him mad."

"Did he...?"

"No!" she flinches, embarrassed by the echo of her voice. "Daddy wouldn't... he wouldn't do that. I know he wasn't _really_ mad at me. Mama said it smells like cordite. I don't know what that is. I didn't know it would..."

I consider asking her if she gave herself those bruises, but I already know the answer to that. Though I keep trying to deny it, we really are the same. So why can't I figure out how to make her smile and laugh again? This is why I shouldn't be around children. I knew my mother was wrong about all this.

One of Nina's hands presses on my sternum.

"He says... it's like a fire, in his chest. He tries to control it, but sometimes he can't. I know he wouldn't ever hurt me on purpose. I know he's trying his best." Nina takes her hand away, leaning to brush over her bruises. "I have to try my best too."

Does she always hurt herself like this? Looking at my stomach, I can still make out the faded lines from ripped skin. There's nothing wrong with you, Nina, I want to say. It's not your fault.

"Can you swim?" I ask.

"Duh," Nina sneers, allowing something of herself to return. She stands and looks down at me with her hands on her hips. "I can touch the bottom of the pool. It's ten feet, you know."

After a moment of debate, I push her in.

Her squeal is swallowed by the water. Bobbing back up, she sputters and whines, "Meanie!"

"I told you I'm not nice," I say with a laugh.

"You have to let me push _you_ in now so we can be even!"

"I'll throw you right back in if you try."

So, of course, she tries – and goes flying when I jump to my feet and pick her up. We repeat this several times, until it becomes a game to see just how high and how far I can toss her, while she smiles ear to ear and shakes with infectious giggles. We stop maybe an hour later when it feels like my arms are melting and I realize – too late – that I've let my guard down as she tackles my legs, bucking my knees and sending us both into a weird, splashy tumble.

Laughing, she latches onto my shoulders and hangs off my back, shouting, "You're a horse now!"

I neigh accordingly.

Our skin is pruning by the time we dry and dress, trying to make one another laugh by doing impressions of old people on the walk to the baseball fields. Here the air is hot and musky from a few hundred bodies and their breath on the air. As we sit in the stands, there's the _plink_ of a bat on ball that sets the crowd in an uproar.

By the time we make it back home, it is past four and I am short one-hundred dollars.

Settled in the Throne, dad scrolls through the news on his PDA, while mother frowns at a spread of papers in the kitchen.

"There you are," she says, taking off her reading glasses. "How did it go?"

"Fine," I answer, cut off from anything further as Nina bursts past me and climbs up into a seat, recounting our escapades in overflowing detail while my mother listens with a patient smile. Her eyes squint with amusement every time Nina calls her _Abuela_.

Father sets his PDA on the coffee table when I sit on the couch and flicks the T.V. on. He turns to watch his wife and their charge. Yoshiya said he could come by to pick her up earlier, but she hasn't expressed the desire to return home and my parents have said they do not mind.

"Come on," mom says, tying her hair up as she stands. "Let's get dinner started."

Nina follows and they begin mincing vegetables. Mother calls them by their German name as they do and Nina repeats the words in a sing-song fashion.

" _Zwiebeln_ ~!"

" _Knoblauch_ ~!"

My father leans into his Throne, absently circling a finger around the buttons of the remote. At ease.

I reconsider bringing up the line of questions that has at dark, quiet intervals during the past few days resurfaced to drag my thoughts into sky-swallowing canyons. Even here, just as everything seems right and at peace, it coils around my mind, repeating the same reading of my father's journal. When I learned that I have the eyes of my grandfather.

"Hey, dad?"

He straightens and turns, pulled away from somewhere. "Hm?"

"What was Ge–" a memory cuts my voice, of the last time this name was used in our home. I stare at the remote sitting atop his armrest. "What was your father like?"

Dad purses his lips and shrugs, turning his gaze to the television. "I don't know," he says, a practiced nonchalance putting his posture more rigid than it was before. He starts to nibble at the flesh of his forefinger and tries very hard to be thoroughly interested in the football game on TV. "He sent me to live away from him when I was four," he says after a touchdown, hand folded into a fist so that I can see his ring. "We didn't talk or see each other for years."

"Why?" I ask, and see the same dark, vacant expression thirteen-year-old Shinji once wore in a photo.

"My mother died."

In the kitchen, while Nina hums and slides chopped vegetables into a bowl, mother prepares the stove and, with a measured smile, intentionally does not look our way.

* * *

There are four opaque, orange bottles standing at attention on the work desk in my room, a hundred and twenty tablets in each of them. Every little pill is a bite-sized bit of emotional stability.

The first one, Lithium, spreads into the central nervous system, reducing norepinephrine and increasing serotonin – the laughable part being no one really knows the exact mechanism it relies on. _It just works_. And that's fine, because all _I_ need to know is that I'll be far less susceptible to suicidal tendencies.

Then there's Prazosin, blocking the effects of adrenaline on the body, which tend to impart the not-so-awesome sensation of dying while I dream.

Ah, and of course there are the antidepressants. This is another fun one they don't know the mechanism for either, but it suppresses the re-absorption of serotonin, keeping it in the reservoir for longer, which means happy feelings _all_ the time. Each therapist I've gone to has said they're meant as a temporary solution and that further cognitive therapy is recommended.

Well, that just doesn't work nearly as well.

And the benzos. They take the transmitters of all those nerve-twitching, nail-biting feelings you don't want and just – cut them off for a while. From this bottle I take two. This isn't recommended, but one tablet doesn't have quite the same effect anymore.

This is how my days have traditionally begun, and here it's no different. Except, after this morning's shower, I enter to see my father standing in my old room, right by the desk with one of the bottles in his hand.

"Got these a couple weeks ago, huh?" he asks and my stomach flips. His back is partially to me. I manage to keep spiteful words down, right in my chest where they start to burn holes.

"So what?" I tug on the collar of my blue shirt, made out of led now instead of cotton.

He shakes it. "Half empty already."

"I get very anxious," I say, berating myself for having not seen this coming. My father isn't a meddler, preferring to keep to himself rather than stick his nose where it doesn't belong – the complete opposite of my mother. When he does, it's always in the worst way and at the worst time. He may think himself discreet and clever, but I've caught his glances to my jacket pockets, seen the pieces being sorted together behind his eyes.

"You don't need these," he says, again not a question or a suggestion. An order.

"I'll be the judge of that, thanks."

His hand tightens around the capsule. "I won't let you take these anymore," he says, facing me fully now, hard and unwavering.

"That's **not** your decision to make," I snap, ready to tear into him as I move to take the bottle.

He grabs the front of my shirt with a strength I'd thought diminished. "You wanna' end up like your old man?"

Fear, in skin-crawling, shuddering waves just about keeps me paralyzed as I relive those nights my father shattered plates and made the walls shake with his voice.

" _Get off me_." I tear his hand away and he staggers into my desk, knocking the bottles to the floor. "I actually need these," I snarl, if only to keep from shutting down. I want him to hit me, like my mother. I need his rage to hurt me, so I can finally label him scum-of-the-earth and be rid of this useless anxiety and this faulty hope.

"So does every other addict," he breathes, visibly calming himself.

"What the hell do you know? Where were you five years ago, huh? A fucking hospital for lunatics because you tried to kill yourself one too many times."

The feeling is cathartic and terrible.

"Keep taking your damn pills, then," he growls, setting the benzos upright on the work table and marching out of my room.

Mother walks up to the threshold just as he leaves, having come up to investigate. She knows everything at a glance, expression cloudy as she touches a hand to the door frame. Nina is on the stairs behind her, curious, but withdrawn.

Embarrassed, annoyed, fuming, I bite the inside of my cheek and start picking up pill bottles before I can say something else stupid. Maybe I was wrong to think I could be comfortable here – or that I'd made any leaps and bounds with him. Hear some war stories, read a few journal entries, and we're as good as new, right?

How do we keep doing this?

"Your father loves you, Kazuya," mother says, making me pause, though I try to hide it. "He doesn't know how to show it, but he loves you."

She doesn't say anything more and heads back down stairs, her voice adopting a bubbly tone that echoes around the house as she tries to pretend, for Nina, that all is still as it should be.

At least it didn't turn into another lecture, another argument, where she sits on that forever-high horse of hers and I throw mud clods in the form of insults. Maybe she's learned that I won't listen, that my pride is too much like hers.

My pride.

* * *

My father does what he knows best and avoids his family. It's hard to blame him much now. More and more I come to see how alike we are, and how I seek out solitude the same way. Sometimes I can't stand other people. Sometimes I just need to be alone. I'm not sure what I'd even say to him if we talked right now anyway, but that one is nothing new.

I have occupied the Throne when he enters the living room, motioning for me to stay put when I jump to stand. He sits on the couch, in the same spot I was when I asked him what my grandfather was like.

"How long?" he asks, knitting his hands together in his lap and peering at me over the rim of his glasses with what can only be a hopeless sort of resignation. "The pills. How long?"

The Throne feels too large. "Five years," I say, crossing a leg, shrugging a shoulder. _No big deal_ , my body says, because I know what he's really asking about. "They diagnosed me with Secondary PTSD maybe three years ago."

The words physically shake him and he closes his eyes, a hand coming up to his face. I've seen my father cry, seen him crumble into a shuddering mess after another terrible episode. What I've never seen is one of those jagged cracks actually split into him before. His fingers weave up into his hair and for a moment there are no masks, there are no barriers, no words. There is just a man, who has tried and struggled so much and been defeated time and again.

"I'm sorry," he says, shaking his head, eyes wet.

"For what?"

"Everything," he breathes.

Without realizing it, I've leaned forward in the armchair and my father is nearer than I remember, close enough to reach out and touch. I twine my hands together. The words are there, in the back of my throat – trapped. Forgiveness isn't a commodity I've ever dealt in. Grudges are easier to hold – and easier to sell as justified.

I nod, lips pursed as he and I find other places to look for the next ten minutes.

"Did someone really spit at you?" I say, feeling far too lucid and, as a result, far too aware of a quiet that needs filling.

He blinks, once – twice. "What?"

"Your journal. You wrote about someone spitting on you as you walked off a plane in Ottawa."

Another string of blinks, then his shoulders shift – he recalculates.

As long as we don't talk about before, about the pills or his dementia, or anything in the here and now, we'll be okay. The war, which seems to have opened this dark rift where I cannot find it in myself to forgive my father, ends up being the only way to close it – as it is the only way I know how to communicate with him.

"The stewardess, actually." he scratches under his chin, stiff, guarded now. Leaning forward, he takes his glasses off and cleans the lenses with his shirt, swiping a thumb across his eye. "I still remember when they were escorting us into the courthouse. Through the windows I caught a glimpse of all the people filling up the square. Thousands of them." he says, debating a frown as he lets his glasses hang precariously from his fingers between his knees. Behind me, he stares out of the windows for a time before pointing. "They all had these signs that said things like ' _baby killers_ ' or ' _no trial_ ', ' _justice for genocide_ '. One group had this banner the size of a bus that read ' _death penalty for pilots_ '."

This I've never heard before. The disdain that filled those who found out his birth name was something I'd known about since I was young, but I've never been told these people had once amassed in the thousands to pray for his death, or that anyone had ever spat at him. No one would ever treat a soldier like that today, not here at least. Then again, I suppose most soldiers don't take part in conflicts that result in the end of the world.

"It was like they'd forgotten we were fighting the Angels before Third Impact," he says, glaring at something I can't perceive. "I thought we were doing something right back then. I thought we were saving people. No one seemed to care about that."

My father isn't so prideful like my mother, but he has it, letting it flourish in small, decisive ways – and this is one blow that's chipped away at it too many times to be measured. He might not have been proud of what he'd done during the war, but after everything – he felt like maybe it meant something. Not in his journals, where he is tortured and dragged down by it. Over time, he has looked back on the war, seen something good to come from it all and taken solace in the fact that maybe, just maybe, he'd done something right all those years ago.

And why not? Protecting humanity? What other cause in the world is more noble? What a mantle that must have been to hold at so young. That might not be the way he saw it, but... well, maybe he deserves to be at least a little proud.

 _"No one cares you fought in some stupid war,"_ I had said, only thirteen. Shame burns my cheeks.

He certainly doesn't deserve to be spit at.

"Looking back on it," dad says, sliding his glasses back on. "I was pretty lucky to have your mom then. I'm not sure I would have made it through otherwise."

The only thing I can think to say is, "You're an odd pair."

He manages a smirk. "I used to wonder if it was really love. We were the only ones who could care for each other. We still do."

"After almost forty years of putting up with you? Has to be love."

That makes him laugh, remembering something he doesn't share. "We learned that, after a while."

So I ask, "Didn't you say she hated you when you were kids?"

Dad looks over his shoulder, just in case there is a red-maned spy lurking about. "Mostly," he answers, shifting and becoming subdued. "When she was an Eva pilot, there wasn't room for anything else in her life."

The conversation me and her had before she left D.C. comes drifting back. "She used to be pretty proud of it, right? What changed?"

"She was hit in a bad way once," he says, quiet, as though speaking of it any louder might make it real again. "Well, much more than once, but... this was different. It was just after the Fourteenth Angel. The whole GeoFront was still a mess after the last battle. They had me on the pilot roster, but Unit-one was on ice."

"What's that mean?"

"Cryo-stasis. In case it went out of control again. They sat me in the plug before the battle, on standby. But in reality, only your mom and Rei were actually active."

"Wait, it went out of control? Like a weapons malfunction?"

"No..." he shakes his head, where I see him cut up bits of the story. With reluctance, he tries to explain. "The Evas were made from an Angel they found in Antarctica, and sometimes they went nuts – took control. That's why NERV had to put the armor on them. Some of the plates acted like restrains that way. Signal dampeners and the like."

I've always wondered why I machine could bleed, assuming Toji must've gotten something wrong. Harry never really explained what made them biological weapons systems, either. Or maybe I just never read far enough.

The Evas weren't just machines.

They were living monsters.

"We didn't know all that back then," he goes on, massaging his palm with a thumb, "me and your mom. We knew they had biological components, but we thought they were just machines too. That's what everyone told us."

He's hiding something from me. By the sidelong dips of his eyes, which only meet mine for a moment or two, though never when he speaks. Or the fidgeting of his hands, which he cannot keep idle. He isn't lying to me – but he isn't telling my everything either.

"So what happened?" I ask, hesitant to push.

My father makes a lazy gesture up. "The Angel was in orbit. We couldn't hit it with any of our weapons. Positrons just dispersed on its field. Command tried to lure it closer and your mom launched against orders. Couldn't stand the idea of Rei taking point."

"Why?"

"She was always like that, putting herself in harms way. Just to prove that she could do it. Always getting hurt."

A smirk finds its way free. He catches it and gives one of his own, nodding – _I know_.

In a way, it's reassuring knowing that even back then my mother was much like she is today. Perhaps mellowed out some from what my father has told me, but still proud, arrogant and all too overbearing. A constant force of change and forward momentum, regardless of right or wrong.

"The Angel..." dad sighs, elbows on his knees and hands clasped together, making me think of a man in prayer. "It was able to get inside her head... it messed with her mind, made her see things, tore away at her memories." he shakes his head. "I remember sitting in the plug and just... I begged them to launch me, but they wouldn't. She just... stopped after a while. Stopped moving, stopped screaming. Misato cut my feed after that."

Again I am reminded of Toji's story – about how the Angels could infect the Evas and control them. I try to picture an alien, made of sinewy folds and wrapped with arcing bands of light that it wears like armor, breaking into my head and scrambling up my brain. The image is an absurd one, and as much pain as there is when my father speaks of it, I wish I could know the real thing.

"Why didn't they eject the plug?"

"Your mom had herself linked into the circuit – direct system overrides through the command chair. They couldn't eject her remotely. She wouldn't let them. They weren't sure if the feedback from the disconnect would hurt her or not anyway while she was under the Angel's field."

"Then how did they kill it?"

"They sent Unit-zero, Rei's unit, down to Terminal Dogma for a weapon. The Lance of Longinus, they called it. Found it buried with the First Angel and it cut right through the Fifteenth's A.T. Field. Lost the thing out in lunar orbit just to kill it." Dad straightens, appearing to drift through the photos that still hang on our walls – built up with memories of a family. "Your mom, though... in some ways, she wasn't really the same after that."

The statement hangs between us. Upstairs, we can hear movement, reminding us that there is still life here.

I can sense there's more he wants to say, though he keeps silent again. He's been sitting on it the entire conversation, which has all been a pretext to put us on speaking terms once more. And so that I can withdraw from the notion of forgiveness. It had been easy enough to forget, to push it into the cold outside and bite my tongue, up until he told me about having to sit by and listen to my mother's screams.

With it comes a weariness in him that I hadn't noticed before, sitting in his shoulders and etched in his face, and I know that my mother was right the other day when she said he was tired. Something that is all too heightened by talk of old battles. Yet here I am, being selfish again and asking for more.

My father pushes on his knees as he stands, cartilage cracking, and mumbles something about finding my mother to take Nina home.

"Hey, I–" my heart thunders, and my fists are tight. I've stood up without witnessing the motion. He's about to disappear around the corner. "I forgive you, by the way."

He stops, but doesn't turn. Rather, I only see a part of his face as it drifts to the side. Slowly, the weight I saw in his shoulders crumbles away. It doesn't make him look smaller or weak, but instead plain, in his black slacks and turtleneck, an ordinary man who both saved and ended the world. Or so some say.

I don't have very good memories of this place or any of our other homes, since the Eva has always been a part of them in some twisted way. Living on through its pilots. I can't just put it behind me. I can't forget missing a mother and wishing for a father when I was growing up.

All the same, from now on, maybe I can at least try to understand.

His feet shift, but only bring him around halfway, where he searches my face. For what, I'll never know.

Neither of us look away.

"Thank you, son," he says and, for a few twilight seconds, we stay that way.

A pair of small feet stomp down the stairs, accompanied by the jingling of Nina's backpack. Mother is not far behind as they enter the hallway by the front door, drawing his attention away. The front door creaks. Keys ring.

I decide to ride along as we take Nina home.

 _August 13, 2026_

 _Sometimes, I can still feel it. We both can. Asuka talks about going to get one of those surgeries – deep brain stimulation – but that's all talk. She keeps taking the pain meds anyway. So do I._

 _They make everything too numb. Make the air heavy, like I'm drowning. But without them, I feel my flesh melt and peel open, and my muscles itch, no matter how raw I scratch the skin. Nerve spasms come and go. There's really no predicting it. At least I'm not dropping bowls and cups anymore._

 _It's not so bad anymore._

 _I had thought the same thing back in Tokyo-3, when Kaji was still looking after his watermelons and in a brief hour everything didn't seem so bad. I still miss those walks home from school._

 _My doubts and fears were pushed away. Piloting had become a part of me. I felt at peace and at home inside the entry-plug. The Eva was a part of me._

 _It wasn't that I had no fear. I was still scared of dying, of getting hurt or waking up in the hospital again. But I understood that people were counting on me to survive. For the first time people expected greatness of me – the Invincible Third Child._

 _Before the Twelfth Angel came, I thought that I was finally ready to fight them._

 _As it turned out, I couldn't have been more wrong._


	28. Chapter 16: December 22

**Chapter 16: December 22**

My father has another session at the VA today and he's letting me tag along.

It's a distant drive through parched soil, pale and gritty – not at all the kind of rich red and orange others think of when imagining Arizona. Rains rolling down from the mountains every once in a blue moon sprinkle bits of life that struggle to sap something from the sands, only to crack and dry out, creating patches of brittle and brown vegetation – cacti standing among them as grave markers.

Our conversation is just as barren and populated mostly by passing landmarks. Traffic gets clogged on I-10 once we hit Phoenix proper, the Southern Mountains close behind. He drives us into a rigid complex peppered with palm trees – a hospital that has gone to great pains to not look like a hospital – and parks under one of the many awnings that double as an array of solar panels.

The wind grows colder as we step out. My father walks ahead of me. "Not so bad for a hospital for lunatics, huh?"

Ah. Now we're making jokes. "Cozy."

An American flag waves over the roundabout, ringing against its tall pole. A gathering bell calling everyone in. The place isn't so different from the hospital I visited my mother at only last month. It is well kept, but more lively in the fake, amazon green plants along the ceiling high windows and under the open skylights. The smell is sharp, almost dry and mingled with something between tar and warm car seat leather. Attendants flit through the hallways, ever busy, or see to the men and women sitting in the waiting area.

At the clerk's desk is a woman with chocolate hair that flows so loosely she often has to tuck it behind her ears, which are of the small and compact variety. She is much younger than me and calls everyone 'sugar'. My father puts on a smile as he checks in and the girl, Kate, nods him down the main corridor, though he moves with an already ingrained sense of destination.

Veterans pass as we walk. Most appear to be in their sixties or older, frizzled hair gray and skin slowly shrink-wrapping tight around their bones. Their hats, shirts and jackets are decorated with branches and unit designations. The conflicts they fought in, whether or not they were POWs or how many tours they served. Most, in fact, are former soldiers of the Third World War in 2001. Most just call it the One Year War now. They wear these markings and badges with pride, nodding and smiling to us.

Everyone but my father, it seems, has something to identify them as a veteran.

He takes us through an unmarked oaken door that's chipped at the bottom and inside are at least a dozen others. Most have the same hard lines under their eyes and around their mouths. Some are far older and a handful are very young, like Yoshiya, a late returnee. He spots us right away, greeting my father with his ever enthusiastic grip on life.

He grins and clasps my hand. "Well look what the cat dragged in."

"Mr. Yoshiya." We shake and, despite bracing my grip, my hand is again nearly crushed in his.

He laughs. "Yoshiya is fine, bud. My little girl's been telling some stories about you." He holds the shake long enough for me to make a light tug away and shares a glance with my father. I get the sense of being silently talked about.

"Ah..."

"Still as talkative as ever." Finally, my poor hand is released and he claps me on the upper arm before turning his full attention to my father.

The others start to move in. They are, each of them, vessels for their profession. Confidant gaits, broad shoulders and lean muscles honed by their experiences. Truth be told, my father looks utterly out of place, yet they shake his hand and pat his shoulder and pull him into burly bear hugs with loud, hearty laughs. Here he is welcomed like a long lost brother. Like family.

Not all of them are members of the disbanded JSSDF, and I am told every week they get new members, some of which come and go, while others feel inclined to stay. Yoshiya says talk therapy isn't for everyone.

Mixed in with the younger men is a woman, an ex-Marine, who was deployed to the Philippines – where Kensuke had once sent us postcards of paradisal coasts. Her original home is in Laredo, Texas – right on the Mexican border. She smiles with big lips and, barely edging in a 5 feet, is feisty. Much to the gathered troop's amusement. Her Japanese is a little broken, but passable. I ask her why she's the only woman here, to which she explains she's only stopping in to visit, since men and women are generally kept to their own wards while at the hospital.

This dumbfounds me and she laughs.

"PTSD is a little different for women than it is for men," she says. "It wouldn't make sense for us to be mixed in the same therapy groups. We process things differently."

One vet, wearing a U.S. Navy cap that says 'Roof Rat', parts a crooked grin. "Well, that and she's a jarhead." He scrambles a finger by his head.

" _Conyo_!" she fights to contain an open mouthed grin, nailing the vet with a sloppy back-handed whack to the ribs that leaves me breathless, but one that he takes in stride and with a big laugh. She says something else in Spanish and the others chuckle, and when she departs, the vibrancy in the troop melts away with her.

In a corner of the room are a few old and likely thrift store bought armchairs, where I take up a post, watching everyone begin to settle at the long table in the center nearest the windows. Despite the welcome, there is a lingering sense – that all present feel but none acknowledge – that I don't quite belong here. Not in the sense that I don't need therapy. I may, in slight, offhanded thoughts, be considering making a dedicated effort at the process, instead of walking out the minute I hear something I don't like.

No, there is a world these men have inhabited that I can't comprehend. I've gone through the standard army training and paramilitary courses, sure, but I'm not a soldier.

"Were you in the army?" jerking, my hip whacks the backrest of an armchair, one of the veterans beside me now. He's decked in a faded green jacket of his own, which is frayed at the collar.

"Huh?" I look to my own jacket, where his eyes linger about, evasive of mine. "Oh, no, this belonged to my aunt," I say.

"Katsuragi..." he grunts, reading the worn name-tag, and becomes reserved. He scratches at his head, covered by a black bandana with white kanji that is too faded in places to read, though I would guess is an old unit motto. Stitched into his jacket is the name: _Nagato_. He is one of the younger ones, with a flat jaw to match his flat face.

"So that must be your dad there, huh?"

I offer him an even smile and hope something compels him to leave. "Yeah."

"I was there, you know," he says, still not quite able to make eye contact. I stand straighter.

"What?"

"Tokyo-three, I mean," he says, hand itching at an empty pocket inside his jacket. "Or, the GeoFront, whatever it was. I was there when those white Evas came down. Your mom fought em' all after," Nagato glances at my father, "after her cable was cut."

"White Evas?" I ask. I know there were more than the handful I've heard about, and that at some point they fought each other, but no one's ever given me a hard number.

Nagato nods, slowly. "The Mass Produced ones. Unmanned. She tore 'em up like they were made of paper."

"Then how did she lose?"

"She ran out of power," he says, stifling a shrug and playing it off by rolling his shoulder. He stares at the others across the room. "Then they got back up."

My heart is pounding in my ears. All those scars. "But... how?"

"Don't know why. Don't know how. They just did. But she–"

Yoshiya clasps Nagato's shoulder, nearest me, his arm a guard rail between us. "She was doing what she was trained to do," he says, with his cheery disposition that, now more than before, appears artificial. Nagato, a slightly shorter man, bows his head a little. "Some of the guys in the Air Division still hold a grudge, but that is them, not us, right?" he holds Nagato there for a moment and at last the man's eyes dart to mine, flashing with a bit of resentment. Whether for me or Yoshiya I can't be certain.

He nods. "Right."

Yoshiya's tight smile stretches and he steers his fellow vet back to the group. Ever a shepherd tending to his herd. Nagato, while distant, appears more comfortable when amidst them instead of apart.

How is it my father is more welcome with people who'd once been ordered to kill him on sight, than with people he'd saved by piloting the Eva? It makes me furious, beyond reason. A strange enough feeling that I am subdued for the next hour, maybe coming off as somber while the ex-Special Forces ease into the session. I'm surprised when none of them, especially my father, ask me to leave. It reminds me of a sermon. Yoshiya is the priest and this is his communion, evoking something precious and sacred. Everyone but my father speaks, save for an encouraging word or two when the others struggle for words.

They talk about some of their experiences, what they see the most, what comes up in their nightmares. One pulled corpses from a mass grave in Chongzuo. He and his platoon were in charge of counting and identifying the bodies. "Five-hundred and four," he says. "I still remember. It was five-hundred and four."

Another saved a little girl from a burning building during the recapture of Medan. They both ended up in the hospital with terrible burns. He still has patches of discolored, bleach-white skin from the grafting. The girl died of her wounds in the bed next to his.

The point, I think, is to relive the trauma until it stops having a hold over them. The ex-JSSDF talk less about the Siege of Tokyo-3, or any stirring event in particular, and simply talk. About wives, jobs, and children. Simply being around people who can relate and who understand is a therapy in and of itself.

I could have understood, couldn't I? If only my father had ever talked to me about it. I excuse myself and slip out the door, landing heavy in one of the seats out in the hall, where the air is chilled.

No, I couldn't have been like Frau and simply offered company, or been like those other men in there and have accepted him and his traumas without question. I was just a child who couldn't comprehend, and we are both still a little bitter after all this time.

When the session is over and we are walking out into the parking lot, I offer again to drive, which he waves a hand at and grumbles. We merge onto I-10 for a second time. The mountains are faded in the clear, endless blue sky, and I have to squint to try and see the entrance to Fat Man's Pass as we leave Phoenix. The radio burbles and whispers as it did on the way here.

I notice my father's grip twitches on the wheel, subtly jostling the car every so often, which hits with the force of roller coaster when going 80 miles an hour.

"Dad?" I put a hand on his arm and he blinks rapidly. His breathing picks up. "Dad, maybe you should pull over for sec."

He jerks again, trying very hard to focus on steering straight, even if he's actually somewhere miles and miles away. I grip his arm tight and he flinches. We turn hard. The seat-belt lock kicks in as I lurch forward, punching some of the air from my lungs and bruising into my shoulder. The stop throws me back into the seat. Dust rolls. Cars streak by.

" _Fuck_ ," I gasp, choking on ragged breaths. My father stares into his lap, hands still tight on the wheel. He's trembling. The vehicle shakes with the passing blur of traffic. For a while we just sit there, and my body is able to come back down to a normal tempo, nerves alert for danger. Today was a bad day to start weening off the anxiety meds. My father relaxes, but otherwise doesn't move.

"Why, uh... why don't I drive, huh?" I ask.

He nods, but doesn't speak. We switch spots and he tries in vain to hide his embarrassment. There are comforting words or phrases for this, I think. Whatever they are, I don't have them, and it's infuriating.

We drive down to where Tucson and _Chīsai_ become an indistinguishable mass of civilization, on the northern edge of the city closer to the Foothills. We both decide, in a form of communication comprised of half finished sentences and then an unspoken agreement, to pay a certain someone a visit before returning to Catalina.

Tucked down an alleyway amid a sea of neon banners is Misato's bar: _Unryū._ Cloud Dragon. The alley is larger and cleaner than I remember, the windows and doors tagged with far less color bleeding spatters of spray paint. The beads hanging over the entryway are emerald and teal instead of the kanji-singed sandalwood I remember, a black dragon standing guard on drapes of white. It's quiet for the time of day, save for a smattering of office workers from the skyscraper a block over sneaking drinks during their lunch breaks. They sit at the red cushioned alcoves thinly shielded with strands of linked metal discs, a haze of smoke making the low-light lanterns glow, as though we are walking through a memory: nights spent here busing tables for Misato instead of going home, washing dishes in the back or kicking my feet at the bar; a squared ring set in the middle and flanked by four posts at its edges where the ceiling is lower.

Behind the bar my Aunt drones a greeting, not looking up from her phone, cigarette bud pinched in the same fingers. When her bored eyes come up to see her fresh custom, they light up and she smiles. As we sit she reaches across the bar to grab my face and slaps a kiss on my cheek, laughing.

Then she pushes me, still playful. "Took you long enough to come see me."

"The old man's a handful," I say, jabbing a thumb at dad. Something artificial creeps into my bones and stiffens my face. I pretend there is not a tightrope beneath us.

Misato pretends along with me. "Oh, I believe it."

Dad's shoulders sag and he taps a cheek. "No kiss for me then?"

She swats at the air. "I see you all the time, what about you?"

It's good to see that my father hasn't forgotten the act either. The sentiment, I can sense, is at least genuine and while Misato pours us drinks and leans forward on the bar, smoking, we are allowed to carry on like we have always been this way. Dad and I can set aside his panic attack in the car, tuck it away in a box upstairs and deal with it when the time comes, as we have a tendency to do.

I'm glad that for once I was there to help him do at least that much.

"A little early in the day for a drink, isn't it?" I ask, taking the glass of cherry-oak liquor anyway, tipped in at only half an inch. I give it a sniff too, just to be sure she hasn't given me whiskey as a joke.

"Never," she says, with a grin so big I could mistake it for barring her teeth. My hand stops when my father grabs his glass and downs it in one gulp. He sets it down firmly on the bar and Misato refills it just so, while I take a bashful sip from my own.

 _Unryū's_ handful of bartenders and waitresses start shuffling in for their shifts. One of them is a thin, gangly man who speaks the same choked and drawling Japanese I grew up around but was never encouraged to mimic. His hair is silver and might have even been black once if the more mottled shades of gray are anything to go by. Misato nudges her chin at him and touches the back of her hand to his shoulder in familiar greeting. He hums, looking tired like Pip back in D.C., but not in a way that makes me think part of his soul is being sapped away at day by day. Other things have worn at him, sure, but he just doesn't appear to care much either way. I watch him light a cigarette with one hand and tie an apron with the other as he moseys behind the bartop.

Misato changes her dialect when she speaks to him. "No smoking at the bar, Aoba."

"Sure, Major," he grumbles, not unkindly, and takes a hard drag from his bud before stuffing it out in the nearby ashtray. He nods, almost absently, to my father. "Shinji," he says, tired eyes settling on me. "This your boy?"

"Kazuya," I answer. Aoba doesn't offer a hand to shake, or make anything of my standoffish tone.

"Makes me feel fucking old," he says, a smile in his eyes, and ambles away while shaking his head.

"Shigeru," my father explains. "Used to be one of the techs in the Command Center."

He must have started here sometime in the past eight years, since most of the people I remember have moved on elsewhere, replaced now by unfamiliar faces. One of the few left from my youth is Kirisaki, a brittle woman who's slang-riddled shouting echoes out of the kitchen.

Later, Aoba takes off his apron and tunes a sleek sienna guitar in the corner, frame worn and chipped. A hand throwing back his long, tangled hair, he plucks at the chords, finding his way into a light melody that scratches softly at the edges. The dusky song blankets an already dreamlike bar, setting the afternoon regulars in a subdued hush.

My father excuses himself, leaving me and Misato to sit and listen while she takes yet another one of her infrequent breaks, sparing only a moment to rinse a pilsner glass. Across the way, by the kitchen, is a small little bamboo tree hooked with paper charms, the smell of fried foods wafting by. Even if I've never had a good understanding of the culture, Misato's bar has always seemed to ache for another place, settling for a shallow representation of it instead. Like the old festivals.

"Hey... have you ever thought about going back to Japan?"

Misato takes a moment to consider as she fills the glass from the tap, setting it down on the table to my left, a half inch of foam sitting comfortably at the top. Turning back, she shrugs. "Sometimes... but I probably won't ever go. When I was a kid, we moved around a lot because of my father's work. I had a lot of homes that never really felt like it. Japan's changed. There's really no point in going now."

"So you won't ever go? Not even just to see it?"

"Maybe someday. Before I die." She snaps her fingers, expression changing from melancholic to chipper in an instant. "I know – I'll set up a shrine in Hokkaido! Send my ashes there when I kick the bucket, alright?"

A laugh. "Sure."

An idea seeds there, the thought of seeing a home that never belonged to me. For the last five years, Hachiro has been pestering me about coming out to visit him and the boys. Says he has a kid now. A little girl who's going to be turning three in January.

It would be nice to see them again, him and Katsuo. All of them, really. Would be a good excuse to finally go visit Hiro's grave, too.

"I'm sorry," I say, finishing off my second glass. In one sense to Hiro, in a more immediate way, to Misato.

She flicks her hair back. "Hm?"

Her silky locks are free tonight, no care given to a braid or even a lazy tie up. The low lighting is easier on her edged features, hardened by years of warfare and struggle, though her chin is still rounded just so, skin tight but succumbing to deep wrinkles. I imagine it is why she haunts here so often, surrounded by her drowning drink and soft shadows.

Finally, she gives me a crooked, but patient look.

"For not staying in touch," I say.

An upward quirk touches the corner of her lips, pale pink. Fingers toy with the treated wood of the bartop. "Does that make you feel better about it?" Her tone is borderline playful, just as I am used to and probably more fond of than I can stand.

A chuckle starts in my chest but doesn't make it out beyond a puff of air. I take my glass and shake it. "A little bit."

Misato obliges, touching the neck of a fat bottle to the rim, twisting it expertly as she pulls away. Not a drop spilled. She steps to the side as I, thinking of my father's bold start, throw the drink back – and spew burning whiskey across the bar. My Aunt cackles in the corner as I sputter.

"Consider us even," she says.

Despite the fire numbing in my nose and the distraught gurgling in my stomach, I can't help but laugh between fits of coughing. I missed this place.

My father returns and we both decide it's time to go back home before mom starts blowing up our phones wondering where we are.

"Come by later tonight," Misato says as we walk out. "And bring your ma'! It's Sports Pool night!"

Mother has just gotten back by the time we pull into the driveway, and is sure to be exhausted. So I'm surprised when she's all at once very giddy at the idea of a night out, overflowing with an enthusiasm I can't recall beyond the age of six. We do not tell her about the incident in the car.

As the sky darkens, mother changes and touches up a bit of makeup, though she's never been one to wear very much in the first place. She is dressed in a black skirt and white blouse, a choker snug around her neck. It makes her look years younger.

Father wears slacks and one of his cuffed dress shirts, throwing on a deep red tie as well. Mother says something to him in German as she fixes his shirt and touches his hair, the only word of which I catch is _Schatzi_ , hooked to the end as if staking a claim.

He pauses and, with some effort, says, " _Danke, liebling_."

For me, khakis and an ocean blue dress shirt will do, the sleeves rolled up because I can't stand to feel like I'm back at work.

" _So scharf_ ," Mother coos, playing with the corners of my shoulders, pleased. These words I remember, from when she used to dress me up for events and special occasions. "Look at that," she'd say, ruffling my hair and attacking my cheek with a kiss. "My little monster turned into a man. _So scharf_."

We drive down into the city again, taken in by the clustered buildings set with bright, artificial light where we can no longer see the stars or the sliver of red out by the moon. Mother drives and the two of them seem more at ease, despite us being out in public, where once we had to worry something might set off an episode. They seem to share more in this moment. A feeling of nostalgia, maybe – of comfort.

Mother is upbeat and talks the whole way. As we step out of the car, I can't hold in a growing warmth and chuckle, nudging my chin at her. "What are you so happy about?"

She beams, coming between me and my father and hooking an arm through each of ours. _My men_. Her smile says. Down the sidewalk, tucked between the amber street lamps and a peculiar red-faced heat, she is practically aglow.

 _January 2, 2033_

 _Kazuya flinched away from me this morning before I took him to school. Asuka says I slipped again last week, screamed at him for something and banged on his door when he shut himself in. I don't remember doing that. For two days she kept her distance outside of mentioning bills and house duties, and I didn't leave our room save to eat, watching the escalating firefights between militants in Ankara and wondering if Misato is out there somewhere. Other than that, I don't recall much of last week at all._

 _When I speak to him now, he is apprehensive, and won't come very close to me unless his mother is in the room too. She has to prompt him to give me a hug before I leave for work now._

 _The flashbacks are getting worse._

 _Driving to work is becoming a chore. It's like – it's like trying to steer while falling asleep at the wheel. Sometimes I just park a mile away at the gas station and walk the rest of the way. If I keep my head down and don't look up at the buildings, that usually calms me enough to withstand another of Mr. Alleyne's tirades about the Japanese's poor work ethic once I get there. Even at home I feel it in my shoulders, pulling on my nerves. Like I'm on the edge of snapping. Asuka will ask me about the mortgage, or bring up Kazuya's school or just – just talk to me and I lose it. I think it might be these new pills. They're not working right, and I know Asuka is just waiting for the opportunity to get on my case about them. She's only biding her time for Kazuya's sake._

 _He's just a boy, afterall._

 _Maybe it's better if he stays away from me._

* * *

 **Author's Notes:**

 _So scharf_ : So sharp.

 _Danke, liebling_ : thank you, darling.


	29. Chapter 17: December 24

**Chapter 17: December 24**

My father didn't wear a uniform. He didn't have a helmet or dog tags and he's never held a rifle in his life. He hasn't marched through jungles or desert valleys, wondering if the next IED is meant for him. Hasn't watched bullets make chunks of meat out of a company of friends. His war was different, but just as visceral as all of the conflicts before it. When he finally made his way out, when he was able to stick his head up above the water and breathe, everyone waved off the sacrifices he had to make and the wounds he had to endure. They told him he was useless for fighting in such a thoughtless war against the Angels. I was one of them.

Upstairs on my work table, sitting right next to the pills, is the death directive he gave me over a week ago. The envelope is still crinkled a bit, otherwise untouched. I've thought of "losing" it, just getting rid of the thing or telling him I want nothing to do with it. He's been in his room in the evenings, but with the door open, fingers working diligently at his computer.

"How much more do you have to go?" I ask from the doorway.

"Maybe ten pages or so," he says, an over the shoulder glance inviting me in.

His little corner isn't the same as it used to be. Not just because the photos are gone or because it's been painted the same sunshine yellow I grew up with. His space is uncluttered, set with purpose. A place he can be comfortable and drift instead of drown.

"So when do I get to read it?"

A tenderness eases over his eyes. He stands, clasping my shoulder. "Someday."

There's still so much he isn't ready to dredge up again. I think I can understand, at least a little. I think of all that I know now, how much of it I have yet to know, and it amazes me he was ever able to sit down and put it all to paper. That he was ever able to come back from any of it. I want to help put a close to that chapter of his life, and maybe let him have a few years of peace before he goes. First, there's something I need to see.

My last therapist asked why I wanted to know about the war. I always thought it would let me know my parents and grasp some sense of who I thought they must have been. That can't ever really happen. For that, I have to go where it all unfolded. If I want to catch a glimpse of those people my parents used to be, I have to go where the war was.

I have to see it.

The sky melds from dawn to dusk, slow and touched with an ease I'm not used to. Somehow the shadows along the mountains are foreboding as I debate over and over how to go about this. Dad's entangled mom in a game of _Go_ at the kitchen table. She hates board games. The only one I've ever seen her play is scrabble. She likes putting a puzzle together with limited pieces. That and she likes to cheat with the rule that German words count too.

Dad is playing as black, snapping pieces down quickly and decisively, while mom agonizes over each white piece she commits to the grand strategy.

Standing in front of my parents in the glare of the back windows – where I start to bake – the words burn and the reasoning I'd planned on sharing out loud, to make sense of it, turns into a lot of useless thinking.

"I'm going to Tokyo-3," I say and both of them stop talking about, what was it? the lifespan of cats? "I mean, Hakone, the crater..."

Neither of them says a word, at first. With the temperature inside and the fireplace going, I'm starting to sweat. It would be nice if I could actually blame the heat. I start to itch for pills I spent a back and forth with half an hour before.

"What for?" mother asks, incredulous. "It's just a big hole in the ground," she says, in a way that suggests it's much more than just a big hole in the ground. It has to be. I haven't been able to stop thinking about how Yoshiya put himself between me and Nagato. Before he could finish talking about that last battle. What didn't he want me to hear?

"Do you... not want me to go?" I ask.

"I don't see why that matters," she says, expression dancing between cloudy and scathing. "You're going regardless, aren't you?"

"Maybe." I don't tell her I've already bought the ticket.

She hums, tosses some of her hair back and focuses instead on the game. "If you'd like to see an empty crater in the middle of nowhere, that's your choice."

I look to my father, who has also been reabsorbed in the game, chin pinched between his thumb and index. Considering the board and his pieces, he sets a black stone down between hers.

" _Scheisse_!"

Dad wipes a hand over his mouth, trying to hide his mirth. She fumes, in a way we can't help but laugh at and, feeling cornered, she pouts and starts to play the game by herself.

"I don't like either of you," she grumbles. As much as she jokes, it's another of her many facades, put up to hide her melancholy.

Standing, Dad steers me outside and Myshka pads atop the table to console his adoptive mother. The watermelon vines are looking healthier today. I nudge some of the shriveling bits with a foot.

"There's something I want you to see in Hokkaido," dad says, a hand on my back as we walk.

"Yeah?"

"They found it just off the shoreline. A part of your mother's Eva."

Even now the word sends shivers down my spine. Sure, I've seen pictures, heard some stories, but this is going to be real. A part of my mother I've never seen in person before. The part of her only he knows.

I'm finally going to see the Eva.

"Why don't you come with me dad? We can see it together."

He takes his hand away, resting it in a pocket. The thought stirs a chord in him. Until he shakes his head. "No, I... no. I don't want to see it again." He jabs my chest. "I want _you_ to see it."

He's just as uncertain about the trip as mom. They've tried for so long to move past it. To be more than throw away toy soldiers. I don't want us to be defined by the war anymore.

"Okay, dad. I will."

* * *

The first time I ever saw Japan was sitting in Mr Ryan's second period history class, through grainy film dried of color. It showed us a country in its prime, preparing to go to war. I saw the cherry blossom trees floating at the edges of the old Sengoku castles, while soldiers paraded through the temple districts in traditional Samurai garb. Women and children in Osaka danced for the Tenjin Matsuri, long before it had been taken under water. Back when Japan had bowed to an Emperor.

Since then, I've had this vision of what Japan is supposed to be. Even after the Great Defeat, it was a nation that clutched doggedly to its culture and ideals. I can't remember wanting anything more than that. To have a place and a people that belonged to me.

Even that image was soured by the war which, through my father, showed me some horrible, dark place that would inevitably leave me broken. So I have this notion. This absurd idea that if I go to the islands, I can take a piece of my father back with me – and maybe make us both a little more whole.

The plane tilts, light gees pushing me into the cushioned seat. As we pass over the southern tip of Hokkaido, I can see Old Hakodate through the window far below, a lone star fort amidst a half sea-swallowed city standing in memoriam. The new capital, Obihiro, cuts a crescent arc in the island. Even as high up as we are, I can clearly make out the rigid order of skyscrapers, comparable in size only to those in Chicago-2. Each one a province all its own.

The northern island itself has turned white, snow spreading over the mainland and all along the coast facing the Sea of Japan, far down by Kyushu. The mountains, reaching in jagged arcs throughout, stop the ice from pooling its decaying touch to the lush green on the other side.

As we land, the sheer size and scope of the city becomes daunting. Metal mountains as likely to take me under as any stone peak in Arizona. The smell hits me first. A salted stink, mingled with the sting of sanitizer and the occasional whiff of oil. The airport is bustling, but not overflowing. Customs still takes an hour. The man at the bulletproof glass window stamps my passport and mutters, "welcome home," before waving me along.

Welcome home.

Every tower appears to grow with every step I take, the sky above belonging to some other world. People don't pay one another much mind. Constant herds moving in singular destinations through compact streets, pretending there is no one and nothing around them. Every sidewalk and overpass has the sense of being apart of a much larger design. Nothing is put down here by accident. All of it has purpose. The very road I walk down is a funnel to red pillars holding arched roofs aloft, stacked atop one another and heavy with an austere sense of age. It's flanked by statues of creatures with wide eyes and mouths barring rows of teeth, exaggerated and colorful. On the other side is a wide bowl with burning incense, from which passing commuters cup the smoke and wave it over their faces.

Everyone bows here too. It feels archaic and forced. Done more out of homage to the way things used to be than because it carries any cultural significance. Even Obihiro, like Misato's bar, aches for a time remembered.

I don't dare try and navigate the railways that cut through the city blocks. For now, It's easy enough to hitch a cab through my phone. The driver's Japanese is precise and curt, making me sound, by comparison, uncultured I suppose. He even gnaws his teeth a little, eyebrows bent, when I stutter the address to him.

The drive is short and barbed.

As we pull up to my stop and I step out, I decide to bow. What is too low? What isn't low enough? When does one even bow? _Too late for that now._

The driver tries very hard not to scowl. As he pulls away, I catch conversation down the sidewalk from a pair of older women, older at least than my mother.

"Such foolishness. Foreigners coming over and pretending."

"Should you really be talking that way?"

"It's not as though he speaks it. He's not really Japanese, not anymore. He's been Americanized like the rest of them."

"It's a disgrace to the ancestors."

"Those who have forgotten their heritage don't belong here."

I decide not to say anything and move on. It was a silly thing to do. What was I thinking? I may look Japanese, I may speak it, but I'm just a foreigner here. This isn't home. Not really.

The Suzahara's have moved out of the valleys to the north and into the city proper now. The message from Hachiro points me a hundred floors up one of Obihiro's towering complexes. Being inside one is a thought too odd to wrap my mind around, coming from so low on the ground. The corridors are spacious and lined with shopping centers and restaurants, broken up occasionally by housing blocks.

Most of the workers and attendants in these miniature towns are from the States. It's easy to tell because of how flat American Japanese sounds, lacking all of the higher inflections, unlike the refugees brought back from China. The former, wearings faces of constant deference, have hands that twitch just before they go to bow. They apologize for what seems like everything.

"Sorry the food is lukewarm."

"No I don't have anything cheaper, my apologies."

"I'm sorry, I know the wrinkles on my shirt are unsightly."

"The water isn't cold enough? I'm so sorry."

"I'm not walking on all fours? Oh how rude, please forgive me!"

Okay, the last one I made up, but that's what they might as well be saying. There's a desperation to be accepted that bleeds into every jittering step and nervous smile, and it's so terribly clear those who survived China and the Balkans have little interest in holding them as equal. Their eyes glaze over when they speak, seeing but not listening. A speck of dust on gold-rimmed glasses.

It's a relief when I finally see a welcoming face in Aunt Hikari. Her long hair, tied low, is almost down to her waist now. We hug, but as I try to step further in she isn't content to let go. Remembering herself, she steps away, smiling that ever bright smile of hers.

"Look how much you've grown," she says with a sniff, swiping at the edges of her eyes as they redden. She touches me and says it again. That's Aunt Hikari. So emotional. Ambling down the hall is Toji, hair receding and now completely gray, save for a few streaks of black left over.

"Hey, I think I remember this guy," he says, rubbing his chin. "What was his name? Kazuki? Kaguya?"

Hikari _tsks_ , delivering a light backhand to his chest and still trying not to break into tears. He smiles and puts an arm around her. Apologizing, she retreats to the kitchen to prepare us tea. Toji shakes my hand, laughing.

"Here now, you've upset my wife. You're gonna' have to stay the whole year comin' up."

"I think you'd have to fight my mother for that."

Toji guffaws, slapping my back as he leads us into the kitchen. "I've offered to do as much before. I tell you, that woman..."

"Hush," Hikari says, trying to hide behind the guise of stern wife, "you're too easy to goad and she knows it."

"It ain't me who's got a problem," he says, settling down at their square table. Everything is square. From the floor plan, to the kitchen and the tiles and the lights. Even the butsudan, black and lined with gold, is square. Images of cranes and dragons and reeds flow within each box, chimes hanging on either side of the stand where the incense is burned.

"So," Toji says, nodding to the shrine, "you Shinto yet?"

 _Oh, boy_. I force a chuckle. "Uh, well no. I mean, not really..." anything else dies before it can grow into a fledgling thought. I haven't missed this part of the visits, the partly innocent and partly interrogation-like questions about my faith, or lack thereof.

Hikari spares her husband a withering look and he shrugs. A tray of tea in her hands, she sets it down between us and starts to pour, saying, "So long as you're not with one of those Third Impact cults."

My Aunt doesn't outright disagree with anyone, only politely disapproves – and will certainly tell you how much she disapproves – all without giving you a hard argument. I could probably flip this table and she'd sip her tea and, with a sigh, say, "I don't agree with what you did, but I suppose that's your right to do it."

"Most of them aren't so bad," I say, shrugging off my jacket and draping it on the backrest.

Toji huffs. "Tell that to the Wolf Brigade."

At my questioning glance Hikari makes a flat grimace, which her husband completely misses.

"It's an organization of temple monks that have a co-policing agreement with the NPA," he explains. "No one openly practices the Trinity religions here."

Hikari, thankfully, steers us away from politics and religions, gushing instead about Sakura's wedding coming up next May. She was another late returnee and is still fairly young. I recall a bubbly girl, whom I may or may not have crushed on as an adolescent boy. Back when she used to babysit me and her nephews in Louisiana.

Toji crosses his arms, but nods. "Reese is alright. I'd have preferred someone from the Defense Force, but she's always had a soft spot for sailors like our granddad."

That's the most flattering praise I've ever heard come out of Uncle Toji's mouth about _any_ of Sakura's boyfriends. 54 years old and he's still the stubborn, overprotective older brother.

After Hikari makes us riceballs, which I manage not to scarf down like a pig, Toji shows me to the guest room. It's actually just the third youngest's old room, framed paintings done in a wild and abstract style hanging from the walls.

The trip out to the main island won't take more than a day and I don't have to meet my contact until tomorrow. People buy passage over all the time through "tour guides", men and women who'll ferry anyone over for a fee. The cost is largely for bribing their way past checkpoints. The UN has kept a token policing force hanging around, none of which really want to be here anymore.

Back in the kitchen we talk more, namely about my parents. Toji rubs the callouses of his finger tips, formed after decades of working the Orleans canals, and asks about dad in a quieter way. Hikari makes us more tea and I feel too rude asking for coffee instead. She doesn't comment much when I mention mother, but listens intently, shoulders high as she holds her tea cup close.

"We'd really like to see them again," Toji says, touching the knee of his prosthetic. No one speaks for a while and the butsudan in the corner draws my stare. Within is a picture of Hiro in his dress blues, so serious and steady. Not at all the curse-slinging hood-rat I grew up with. We were about the same age when we met. He was born in winter and, like Yuki, I found in him someone who struggled to find their place just as much as me. Up until he joined the US Army. Happened the very minute he turned eighteen, completely on a whim. We'd been sitting on his back porch and he was smoking a birthday gift from Hachiro: a pack of Italian cigarettes. Hikari was having it out with him in the house for it.

Hiro stood up, flicked his bud to the sidewalk and said, "Fuck it."

He marched right down to the recruitment office and the next morning, hot off a fight with his father, boarded the bus out to basic. They made up when he finished training and from every night on, Toji would annoy the patrons in bars across Louisiana talking about his son the Army man. We'd joke that it wouldn't be long before he was in all the Cajun city jazz. "Who 'dat Jerry Army man? Hiro-man! Hiro-man!"

"He'd have been twenty-seven a few days ago," Hikari says, a smirk failing to reach. Toji takes her hand, and that at least brings her sad smile free.

For six years I've been cut off from the world. I was apart of it, but not living in it, shuffling from one needless task to the next trying to find my way. I could have made the time to come to the funeral. I should have made time. Hiro deserved that.

He deserved to have another person there to remember him.

* * *

Nightlife in Obihiro crawls with neon light, blending together and blossoming amber-gold off the windows. Motorcycles scream by as I walk out, streets echoing with the hoots and hollers of their riders. One of them has a red jacket with the numbers 02 painted in white on the back. A pair of police cars aren't far behind.

Panels that, during the day showcase directories and broadcast the goings-on in a city too large for itself, display public announcements made by a woman with a smile that's too bright as she encourages citizens to be wary of cultist activity and report any suspicious behavior to the authorities. They roll by in armored trucks and on the gardened skyways, or at intersections where I can spot the wolves, decked in black riot armor with air filter masks and goggles. The reflective plating makes them glow red in the electric light.

As I walk, I sense the city changing. Not even the wolves can witness every narrow street or crowded underpass. From somewhere on the next block over, I can hear drums, a pounding rhythm that feels like a heartbeat. Obihiro is divided into 49 special wards. Each with its own identity in a place no one can say for sure where Japan begins or ends.

Crossing through Otofuke, the hiss of the rail cars above the city's deep canyons turn into a roar, somehow drowned out by the shouting of stumbling drunks and alleyway singing parlors. Their cadence melds with Memuro, where merchants chant their limited-time-only sales on fresh goods, enticing families to gather around bowl shaped trash-bins while ripping at crab shells or sinking their teeth into the spilling juices of watermelons. A fat, bloated economy where consumers purchase as hungrily as the melon eaters stuff their faces.

Talking over everything are the adverts, men with boisterous voices shouting down to the inhabitants all there is to buy and make their lives wonderful and carefree. Behind these and sitting beneath the industrial towers are store fronts extending on the walkways ten stories up. They fade as one enters Shimizu, put under by the droning chorus of monks making their way through these pillars of civilization with all the unhurried intent of a river cutting through a gorge. The bells of the shrines, carried with them to purify the city, drape chills over my shoulders with each jingle.

It's here that I brave the railways rather than face the taxi drivers and their sneers, navigating a circuit board network out to Mount Tsurugi. The place has been turned into Obihiro's graveyard, a cemetery built atop tiers like the walls of Japan's old castles. Each level has a crooked order to it, jagged with square pillars of varying sizes and not unlike the city whose dead it houses.

Here I meet a man I don't have to worry about bows or handshakes with. We hug in a way that seems more like a contest to break one another's back than a warm greeting. Hachiro steps back, holding my shoulders and grinning his father's grin. He has his long hair combed back now, a halfhearted attempt to hide a growing bald spot.

"Goddamn Kazuya, it's good to see you," he says.

"Wish I could say the same."

He chortles, stepping back and motioning at the bag by my feet. "What'd you bring?"

"Only the best." It was difficult to find, but I managed to hunt down a bottle of Canadian Whiskey. It's been a favorite of the Suzahara's ever since I smuggled some down from Misato's stash. For Hiro, I'll suffer the swill.

It isn't long before the second eldest, Katsuo, shows up – bringing Masaru and Noboru with.

"Hey, Hachiro!" Katsuo calls, "how did you get your chains off? Won't Rina be sending out a search party?"

Hachiro's expression clouds. He doesn't like talking about his wife. This prompts a bout of less-than-brotherly insults, which is – even after all this time – nothing out of the ordinary. He and Katsuo have been fighting since they were kids.

"Alright, quit pissing around and walk, huh? We're here to see Hiro." Masaru, peacekeeper since he was twelve, says with a laugh and a touch to Hachiro's shoulder. He's sharper than his brothers, toying with the cuffs of a fitted suit. What does he do now? Something in Network Marketing, I think.

"Where's Rokurou?" Hachiro asks, scouting the troop.

"He's at some fucking rally in Nakasatsunai district," Katsuo says, throwing a hand, "protesting the Wolf Brigade."

"I oughta' go down there hand him over to 'em. 'Here officer, please arrest my idiot brother...'"

Masaru shrugs. "He's going through that whole idealist phase. He'll get over it once he grows up a little."

Noboru shakes his head. "All he's doing is upsetting mom..."

It's unanimously agreed then that tonight their next stop will be to the rally to knock some sense into their younger brother. Already waiting by Hiro's grave are Takeshi and Akio, who has just turned 17. Hanging off the arm of the former is a girl who, by the jeering and absolute disregard for manners, has already been taken on as a sister by the others. Hachiro likes her 'cause she can hold her liquor.

Akio is quiet, but loosens up when his brothers gather around, as if given permission to be himself.

A hand brushing his shaved head, he asks, "Is Rokurou–?"

"Forget it," Hachiro snaps. "We're going out later to belt him."

Akio swells, only to close his mouth, protest leaving as an unheard sigh. At Masaru's prodding, he reluctantly talks about his progress with the temple, where he is training to be a monk. I've never known the older brothers to do more than scoff at the idea of upholding the family religion, but when it comes to Akio, they're excited and all too proud. Like when Hiro left for the Army.

Drinking begins promptly. Even Akio takes a shot. With Hachiro around there's no getting past it. He pours several drinks for Hiro to the praise and shouts of his brothers. Then, a moment of quiet prayer is allowed to pass as Noboru lights the incense. It doesn't last very long as Hachiro downs one of Hiro's shots and passes the other to Katsuo, who begrudgingly accepts.

Takeshi balks. "You– you can't drink those! You have to leave them for his spirit or something. What was the point?"

Akio's face falls, the very image of wise sage. "It is the intent that is important," he says, pressing his hands together and bowing.

Hachiro winks. "See? The monk says so. Hiro would want me to drink it."

The more they drink, the more stories that are shared about Hiro. Akio has few, but listens eagerly as Katsuo and Hachiro argue over the details of their escapades. From girls to nightclubs to gang fights along the New Orleans canals.

A police patrol calls out to us. Noboru fumbles with the whiskey and Akio looks ready to throw up. Hachiro puts on that easy charm of his, walking up to them with a swaggering gait.

The eldest Suzahara can make a friend out of anyone. You could drop him in the most hateful, racist, poor slum in South America and without knowing a lick of Spanish he'd have everyone sharing a drink and laughing in fifteen minutes.

He accomplishes that, minus the drinking, in only a minute with the pair of cops. Posture lax, expressions bright and at ease, one would think they and Hachiro have been old buddies for years now. As they leave, the brothers decide it's time to go. Raising one last drink to Hiro, they set off – the younger boys stumbling to the laughter of the elders. A troop of clowns, to be sure.

Later, Hachiro sends me a picture of Noboru sitting next to Rokurou, an arm thrown over his shoulder and each sporting some bruises, though the latter definitely has the worst of it. Katsuo sits next to them, smoking, and bleeding from his nose. Far in the background are the crowds of protesters and their flags.

The next morning, before I go to the meeting area, I venture into the heart of downtown. It's actually the most open space in the city, a garden filled plaza ringed with government buildings. The plants and trees are cropped low, so that even across the courtyard one can always see the red pillar in the center of it all. A nexus point. No one going anywhere in the city can hope to miss it. Even the trains passing at the edges can hold it in plain sight. If only for a moment.

The walk to reach it feels like a lifetime, until I'm standing far beneath a ten story tall red slat, marked with segments of black and orange. The hunk of metal is scarred and dented in some areas, never refurbished or restored to whatever condition it was in before. Cleaned and preserved, yes, but left in its half-decayed state, as a reminder of everything it'd gone through in its unremembered war. Commuters give it a wide berth, while visitors and tourists get right up close, needing to see it and touch it. Crowds of them, reaching out just to graze it with the tips of their fingers.

It sits on an obsidian block, where one can stand and see their own colorless reflection. At my height, cutting across my chest, reads – _In memory of the Angel War and those who fought it in our place._

It's just one of the shoulder pylons, the one part of it they found somewhere out by the shore. I read in an article it housed these projectiles the size of a bus. The pylon itself is huge and gives me a glimpse of the hulking mass that must've been the Evas. I can almost see the head, right between two of these armored pillars, red plate bright in the shimmer of fire and summer sun. It's one thing to see pictures of it stalking through a city block, quite another to stand up to a physical piece of it. They were giants. Titans.

It's still hard to believe they were operated by people so small and unprepared for combat. What must it have been like, watching them battle each other? It leads me to wonder where the other pieces are. Why there's only this lonely sliver of it left.

"She used to be awful proud of being a pilot," dad had said, sitting on our back porch and looking over his winter garden. "That was all she had back then. It was who she was."

The sky is gray here, gripped in a cold that cuts deeper than any of the valley winds in Arizona. I reach out to touch the glass stone.

"Hey, mom."

* * *

I meet my contact at the docks in the southern industrial block, drenched in the smell of oil and dead fish. There are two others already waiting there when I step out on the long concrete loading platform; a man who's much younger than me, and a woman. She wears a red coat with a hood, long black hair tucked within. The man nods, but doesn't bow, or thankfully feel inclined to trade names. The woman stares out at the sea, visible only through a gap at the neck of the river where it bleeds out into the ocean.

Our "tour guide" as he joked on the site, waddles up from the lower docking platforms decked in a heavy coat and beanie. Through a scraggly-haired face he grins, but no one bows or shakes hands. We've already paid him half the fee – the rest he takes once we get there.

"Name's Henmei, if you cared to know," he says and motions for us to follow, then stops. "You're not any of those, uh, Trinity nuts are you? I don't carry them to Honshu. Jin'll boat you over if that's the case, but I'm keeping the money."

The three of us shake our heads and Henmei relaxes. "Good, then let's get on board the _Nihon-Maru_."

The ship with such a noble name is an old speed boat, maybe used for racing, but painted over to stand out far less. He steers us out of the bay and into the open sea. The spray of the water is chilling and I regret not bringing something with a hood. Several times we're stopped by military patrols, who are persuaded to look the other way. They seem to know Henmei well.

No one speaks under the buzz of the engine, not until we reach a tiny dock on the tip of Honshu at a place called Aomori. Here, he has a re-purposed military truck, the back draped over with green canvas. We board and I am reminded of people in a different era who were taken far out to the tundras in these transports to be shot. The back at least has a port so we can see Henmei. As we drive, he explains that most of Japan has been sealed off and abandoned for the past twenty-nine years, save for the parts of Kyushu not flooded or utilized as a UN naval port. There aren't really any settlements beyond Fukushima, except for Matsumoto, which is more of a construction colony anyway – a gathering place for all the corps hired out for rebuilding and scavenging. One might find pockets of refugees from Indonesia here and there too, squatting in old towns. The UN has been pretty lax with its gate-keeping policy, as evidenced by our relatively easy passage.

Ever so slowly, Japan has started to come back to life.

I always thought the islands outside of Hokkaido would be scorched, barren places. But it's beautiful here. Clouds of snow converge from the mountain tops, hiding them in their mist and giving the impression that we're crossing realms, the only barrier between which is an endless sprawl of trees frothed with ice.

Entire cities lie abandoned, buildings having fallen into disrepair, their decay aided by roving bands of returnees in the earlier days. All of it lies empty now, ghost towns, each one of them. The scenery changes as we take an old highway by the coast. Many of the island's shoreline prefectures were taken under water after Second Impact and it takes me a while to realize we're actually driving along the side of one of those mountains that looked to be floating in the sky, passing by the crooked remnants of a dozen cities. Out in the dark waters is the top of what must have been a temple, still plated in gold despite decades alone and untended.

The red coat woman shifts as we jar over a bump, gripping tight to something. In her lap is a bronze urn with maple leaves scattered across it.

"Bringing my grandad back home," she says, catching my stare. "It took a long time, but we finally made it over."

Her Japanese sounds subdued. A native unused to speaking it. I'm not sure what to say, but she speaks for both of us. I learn that her name is Kei. She was an orphan at four and raised by her grandfather until he died three years later. Then she was sent to live at a Tenshido Revelation Church in Glasgow. She was raised during what she calls the Puritan Revivalist movement, an attempt to pull up the last roots of Catholicism and, by extension, Tenshido Monotheists left over from the religious bludgeoning that had groups at each other like common street gangs after Scotland's Riot Act was repealed.

"So, I became one of the faithful," she says, glancing at the back of Henmei's head. He doesn't seem to hear us over the jostling of the truck.

"Do you still believe?" I ask.

She turns, looking at me sidelong. "How can I not? It was real. It happened."

"So you think there's some spirit called Lilith still hanging around?"

At my smirk, her smile grows a bit. She sets the urn in a bag between her feet, wearing nothing but stockings and a long black skirt, of all things. "In Tenshido, Lilith isn't a person so much as she is a light of the soul. What makes us... us, I suppose." in her lap now is a sketch pad, where she draws circles within circles, three of them forming a triangular formation. "We, people, are Lilith, broken apart in fields of light. It's not so different from the stars in the sky, really."

"I've never heard it that way before," I say, watching her wrap the symbol within the core of an apple.

"That's because most people need something literal." around the apple, a snake eats its own tail while seven disembodied eyes watch. "They need something tangible to hear them and guide them."

"So have people and Lilith always been connected and we just never knew?"

Even with the rumbling of the truck, her touch is sharp, wrist moving with the jumps and turns more than trying to control them. "You could say that. No one understood what her light was until the war. Until the world-eater gave us the choice."

"The world-eater?"

"The Eva. Unit-one."

One of the orbs in her sketch, cut with slits that might be eyes, has a maw of square teeth ever so slightly parted. As though it's on the edge of a grin.

"I'm not sure I can believe all that."

Some of her black hair falls, swinging to touch the paper. "You don't have to."

Her pencil scratches on the final touches, hand stowing her stray locks away. She tears the page off and hands the little diagram to me. A small arrow points to one of the circles just beyond the radius of the bigger three: a little black shadow.

Next to it reads – _This one is Kazuya, the Stubborn Traveler._

Smirking, I look back to find her set into the paper again, trying to hide one of her own. We sit together in the quiet carried by the breeze, fading as the world molds from a serene, white covered landscape to dark green forests and alpine meadows.

The boy, Chikuma, likes to play the harmonica. Sad melodies that remind me of home. He tells us he's from Colorado, only speaking when prompted. He is shy, I can sense, catching the patient smiles that flicker here and there.

"So, why did you come?" Kei asks. She's focused on me now, innocently intent. Her coat is just a little too big for her and I wonder how old she is. Surely too young and pretty for me.

"It's really not so important."

Kei quirks her head with that knowing, patient look. My lips work a smile and I shake my head. She leans in, egging me on.

"My parents were in the Angel War," I say, trying to gauge her reaction. "They were pilots."

Her brown eyes twinkle and, half in jest, she appears to give my answer deep consideration. "There weren't that many of them active, were there?"

Again, my lips twitch. "No, so then I guess they would be _the_ pilots."

She crosses her legs and bounces a knee. "You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little skeptical."

"You don't have to believe me," I say, finally lending her that cunning smile she gave me earlier. Kei bites her lower lip to stifle a giggle, sliding her hair back. She looks away, out to the highway. A flock of cranes flies over the water.

"My grandad used to tell me stories," she says after they become distant. "He lived on the outskirts of Gotenba in one of the mountain temples."

"There was one battle, before Tokyo-three was destroyed by the other Angels. He said the Eva nearly landed on his house, so close he could feel the heat from its armor and the arms of the Angel. They were made of energy, or light. They cut through buildings like butter and the Eva grasped them to keep it at bay, wrestling the giant. My grandfather said he could see the Eva's skin ooze and bubble. It threw the Angel down the mountain and, with nothing but a small blade, cut through its heart. For a while there was the imprint of a giant left in the mountain side. He said nothing really grew there after that."

When she looks back and softens, I realize I've been staring. Watching the sway of her hair and the way her hands move through them. How dark but bright her eyes are all at once. I look elsewhere.

"Which ones?"

The question startles me and I turn back. Her heels click against one another.

"Which ones did your mother and father pilot?" Kei asks.

"Unit-two was my mother's. Unit-one was my father's."

Examining her shoes, boots with loose strings, she nods, but says nothing more. We pass forests of thousand year old cedars. Overgrown societies of Sakhalin spruces, Sakhalin firs, blue firs, and Yezo spruces mixed with broadleaved birches, oaks, and maples. Beneath them is a dense undergrowth of mosses and lichens. Kei points out a deer watching us.

It's not until we rove through old Tokyo that my visions of scorched earth become real. There are little hand crafted monuments all along the outskirts of the road as we pass into what the orthodoxy brands holy ground, left by other pilgrims who've made the journey. Mostly wicker figurines and crosses of varying size. A crooked graveyard that goes on for miles as far as I can see.

Henmei stops and we climb out, joints aching. A light drizzle starts to come down, tickling my neck and dashing the water with ripples along the beach, just down the hill from where we are. Further off, I can see shadows protruding from the waves. Not buildings. In fact, they look more like crosses.

"What are those?"

Henmei, hanging out of the driver side door with his pistol, shrugs. "No one's really sure. Bigwigs say they're just dead Evas. Shin Seiki say they're the remains of an old god, or some shit like that."

"What happened?"

"It was the last battle of the war, I think."

Kei latches onto her right arm. "The Red Sacrament," she says, her gaze speaking volumes greater.

The hush of the waves is much louder here, like in Panama. There are wooden posts, maybe the remains of homes or a dock, jutting along the beach. They trickle up the hill, where I can see the imprint of tank treads left in the dirt.

My mother was here. There was a battle she fought and lost in this place. Once, she had faced monsters here too. They both had. Maybe not in this exact spot, but as close as I'll ever get. Turning, I find Kei waiting for me.

"Where do I go?" I ask Henmei. He points to the hill, where Chikuma has already started up into the mists crawling over the rocks, the singing of his harmonica leaving a trail for us to follow. It isn't steep, but the walk from the road is long. Henmei says we can't go through the cities to see it.

"Too many falling buildings. That and the squatters. Sometimes you find more than just rabid packs of dogs."

So he drove us out to this barren mountain side. With each step gravity becomes harsher and the air comes in thinner. Chikuma's playing gets louder, until we crest the top, finding him sitting on a boulder playing out his harmonies.

Here, the earth stops, opening up to a black, drowning maw so large the other side is hidden on its own horizon as the rim arcs out. It's like we've walked to the edge of the world, so vast and consuming my eyes sting just trying to take it all in. Vertigo hits next and no amount of blinking clears the colorless splotches away. I fall more than sit down, tingling senses needing to feel hard ground beneath me, else I might tumble in. Particles drift through the weak beams of light trying to penetrate the shadow.

I understand. To some degree. I finally see the gaping void my father has been struggling to climb out of since the war ended. It howls, echoing with an emptiness that can never be filled. It ate everything and everyone whole, swallowed up my mother so she was almost never seen again. This is as deep and terrible as any scar on her arm.

This is eternal, unmistakable proof of their struggle here.

Something warm glides down to touch my lips.

Kei wraps her arms around me from behind and starts to sing. I don't know the song, but the words tell a story about a girl who carries a baby over a mountain dawn to dusk at the behest of a noble lord, wishing for the day she can finally go home.

When my tears stop, and her song has run its course, she kneels beside me, urn in hand. She twists the top off and stares into the blackness. The weight on her thoughts is darker than any pit. Heavier than any ocean. A foreigner like me on an island far away.

Lifting her head, Kei tosses the ashes free.

They float away into the dark below and she hugs the urn as we watch. Long enough for the clouds to sweep the sun away and darken with rain. Long enough for it to reach us as flecks of snow, a damp kind of cold that soaks the earth and never dries out. The kind that freezes your hands and feet off.

Kei doesn't move as I stand, still gazing into this abyss created by war.

When I hold out my hand to her, she contemplates it as though it is some otherwordly object, attached to a strange, alien thing with a human likeness. When our eyes meet, she seems to make a decision. With unsure fingers, she takes my hand.

Chikuma, our quiet witness, leads us back down.

"I come every year to play songs for my mother," he says. Without him I'm sure me and Kei would've been lost on this mountain side. She stares at the ground as we walk.

"My father died when I was eleven," he continues, never once looking back. "Two years later, mom came all the way out here to the crater and threw herself in. I wonder how long it took her to reach the bottom?"

Neither of us has an answer and he doesn't expect one.

"She used to like it when I played."

Kei, fixing to the slim red arc creeping through the gray-blue sky as she looks up, nods. "I'm sure part of her still does."

Henmei is leaning against the rear of his truck, patiently awaiting our return. The engine gurgles as we board and before we leave, Kei hesitates, setting her grandfather's urn down by the side of the road. I help her in when she runs back. Chikuma falls asleep on the return trip, while me and Kei watch a crater called Tokyo-3 disappear on the horizon.

As we come in range of Fukushima and civilization, my phone starts to chirp with delayed messages and missed calls. Most are from my father.

I dial and he picks up before the first ring.

"Kazuya?"

"Dad? What's wrong?"

"You need to come home. It's your mother."


	30. Chapter 18: December 27

**Chapter 18: December 27**

In my dreams, we have a different life.

Sitting on my father's shoulders I can brush the tops of the sea grape trees, round leaves arcing over the boardwalk and painting it with jagged patches of shade. He lets me down when we reach the sand so I can race him over the dunes, while mother calls for us to watch for sand burs. The sun is burning on the beach, each step more stinging than the last. We don't care.

I beat my dad to the pier, built atop granite shards of boulder, coated with barnacles where the water laps between them. He's taller and bigger than me, so climbs up faster. He leans over and pulls me to the surface of the sun-blazed rocks. Stingrays skirt the edges by the shallows, where it's cooler. Laying flat, we dip our hands in, fingers gliding over their smooth spines as they sail by to greet us. I warn him about their barbed stingers, which I have just learned about in school. But he tells me not to worry, because he knows the rays. They're gentle, and wouldn't let us touch them if they didn't want to.

Mother lounges just out of the water's reach, hair tied up and silver sunglasses shielding her eyes – so she can watch us comb the shallows for shells. She catches me as I run up, taking the small shell I've found just for her. I have picked it because it's the same shade as her hair.

"It's nice, but I have nowhere to put it," she says.

"I'll find more and make you a necklace," I say, and her tenderness deepens a little more.

"What if I want just this one? What will you make the necklace out of?" she asks. Not because it concerns her, rather, she just likes to hear my answers.

I pause. "I'll become a deep sea diver and find you the biggest, prettiest pearls."

I grab her hand, and hook her pinky with mine. There are no scars on her arm, and I make my childish promise.

Father crunches up from behind, kneeling on the towel beside her. He's just taken a dive in the sea, bits of it dribbling from his hair.

"Go away, you're all wet!" Mother cries, laughing. He weaves his fingers through her hair, part because he knows she hates the wetness on her ears, part because he likes the feel of her hair. She whines, but with a smile, and he kisses the top of her head.

I want to go out into the waves with him too. I want to see how far and how deep we can go. I'm not afraid. Mother snags me before I do, rubbing more sunscreen to my back. She comes out into the water with us. We go far, all the way to a waiting sandbar, where the waves are clear again and we can stand so it's only up to our waists – my shoulders. The current carried us way down the shoreline, but we know where we are.

Back at our teal towel, underneath the shade of an umbrella, we lie down and I fall asleep between them as the sun takes me away into the sky. We sleep and nothing wakes us.

In my dreams, the war never happened.

Even as the airplane skirts the surface of the tarmac, I can't shake off that blanket of sun, or the easy give of the sand. Arizona has been covered in a blur of white. The frozen rain comes down in thick, wet sheets, sinking a damp and numbing cold into the red earth. A heavy ceiling of gray clouds still pours it down, and doesn't look like it intends to stop.

I ease into my seat, letting everyone pass by. The dream fades to nothing but icy winds, gone from my grasp, try as I might to recall them. It feels familiar, like a dream I've had before. Part of it, I think, is from a memory.

Memory has always been a sad sort of thing to me. Not because of the hurt that it tends to keep, but because of how intangible and fleeting it is. I can walk down Tucson's streets, tell you what I did and where, remember the faces with me, what they said. They're nothing special, and I can recall them easier than anything else I might have thought more important. Things that should have been more deeply carved.

Memory is weak, when you look at it. Memory is just neurons – touch, smell, sight – bunched together in sequence. They fire, recreating the sensation that forged them, summoning shadows and vague impressions.

Every time I smell cigarettes, a hundred different bundles fire. The images follow me out of the airport and down the street, guiding my senses away from the biting freeze. I think I have it then, the moment from my dream, with my mother. How much of it is real, I can't say anymore. Sometimes the synapses repeat so often, they lose their vibrancy, like a painting cracking and fading over time.

It was afternoon, on the edge of twilight. The sun was at that perfect precipice where it melted away into everything around us, casting it all in gold and heat. Gnats dance beyond the screened windows, which were open to let the breeze in. Wind chimes coo in the sunset, bells signaling the close of day. Humid, sunny Florida.

Sitting at the kitchen table, my mother stares down the road that leads to the coast. Father has taken his truck out to the beach again. One hand has a cigarette, and the other props her chin, mind somewhere far and secluded. So wrapped in thought the world around her might as well be imagined. Her hair is just a little longer than it was last year. She's let it grow some. My mother is beautiful.

Filling her eyes again, she turns, and when she looks at me, it's as if the mere sight of me fills some missing piece in her. It's hard to see her face, cast in shadow by the fading light. But with just a look, I know that I am loved more than I will ever understand.

I jump into the chair next to her, my feet dangling. There's a green lizard on the window. Another memory hazes to the surface.

I'd found one once, on a broad leaf by the grapefruit bunches. Mom was picking them from the tree, stretching on the tips of her toes to hook them in a small basket atop a ten-foot pole. The spotted bark scraped up my feet as I came down, this new creature caught in my hand. Mother's cheeks were flushed, even with the straw hat to shade her.

I remember she shook her head when I opened my hand to show her. "You have to let it go," she said. Without whining or pouting, I solemnly nodded my head, more sad than anything. Dad had told me how rare they were. How the brown lizards, not native to Florida, ate them.

The guilt in her was unmistakable. She put her hands under mine. "He'll be okay," she said, coaxing my thumbs loose, and together we watched it dart into the ferns. I never saw one again until now, thinking they were extinct.

I wonder then if it's the same one we let go?

Mother stares at me, appearing to track each muscle and bit of hair, as though trying to etch every line to a memory. One of her hands opens up to me on the table.

"What would make you happy – right now?" she asks.

At first, I don't answer, giving her question considerable thought. I play with her hand on the table, then reach for the other. She gives it and I try to enclose both of them in my small ones. My mouth moves, but I can't hear my own voice.

"Are you sure that's enough?" she asks.

I nod and shake her hands to punctuate. She moves them, playing with my fingers. Then she smiles. I can always make her smile. She hooks a pinky with mine.

"Then it's a promise."

The hospital is too quiet when I enter. Too empty. Every hall is lighted, cast in clean radiance. If not for the clerk at the front desk, I'd have assumed the place was deserted. Each footstep sounds louder than the last.

Memory is fragile.

It doesn't matter how long my parents have been together. Or even how early they became so close. Soon my father's brain won't be able to sustain the neurons that hold his memories together. Soon, he'll forget she ever existed in his world. I nearly put her, both of them, out of mine, and I'm not the one with dementia.

What will people think of them in a hundred years time? Who will remember them? Will they see a pair of broken people, doing the best they could in a world that threw them to the wayside? Or will they see a man and woman who, against all odds, despite their suffering, built a home?

The thought locks me stiff at her door. Room 222.

Her eyes are closed when I enter.

I almost don't see my father sitting at her bedside, head bowed. He's just as late to notice me at the door, turning slowly and staring like I've just walked out of a dream. I feel like I have. I've been drowning in that pit named Tokyo-3 for so long, forgetting the good memories I had under the pile of black ones. The only ones I really kept.

The Eva's shadow is long and dark.

Mother's hair is still its bright tint of orange-red, fighting the bland, colorless landscape outside her window. She's so very still. At rest, it looks like. I step up to her bedside, a hand on my father's shoulder. Her chest rises softly.

Later, she'll say, "I told him not to call you back. I told him I was fine. It was just chest pains this time." but now, she opens her eyes. They flutter and find me, and I know that she's been waiting for me. Like she promised.

"Hey, mom," I say, soft as I come closer, touching her hand. "I'm here... I'm home."

I lean over the bed and take her in my arms. She seems so much smaller than I remember. At first, her movements are heavy with sleep, but soon she clings tight to me. I know not everything is healed. There are still ugly words and twisted emotions I can't ever take back. Scars too deep to be closed. But I don't have to live in them anymore. I can cross the waters out to that sandbar. I can leave the Evas and their war in the sea.

Mother holds me, chasing the cold away. Father watches us with his gentle, but bright smile, like in my dreams. Neither of us let go, and I feel the wetness on her cheeks as she buries her face in my neck.

"Welcome home."

* * *

 ** _End._**

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** epilogue coming soon. Until then, I'd like to thank everyone who favorited, reviewed and followed _Inheritance_ , and want to give a special thanks to **Merchant Of Blue Death** for his military insight and corrections, as well as **Iuvenal** , for sharing his thoughts on world building in an After Impact world.


	31. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

 **December, 2067**

Asuka Marie Amemiya was in charge of holding the flowers. Just this morning she had seen to their selection, inspecting each petal for rot and blemishes. Only the healthiest would do.

As the railcar squealed into its station, the round sun flowers fell on her face and she fumbled as they boarded, caught by mama's hand on her back. Asuka sneezed, hearing one of her soft chuckles as she tried to wipe her nose, and then they were off.

She had only been to Hokkaido a handful of times, that she could remember at least. The cherry trees were bare this time of year in Japan's numbing, white winters – nothing like papa's home back in Arizona. More like the winters in Scotland, where mama took her to see Les and Marie. That's where her middle name came from. Papa joked that he and mama had flipped a coin for what her first would be.

She was visiting her other grandparents today, riding the elevated railways that stretched from Furano along the three Daisetsuzan mountains, all the way to the sprawl of Kamikawa. It was over an hour to ride from one end to the other.

Asuka clambered into the seat by the window, where she could watch the snowfall through the forest of marble markers, as if growing to touch the blue sky above. Mama sat on the row behind her, taking her golden orange hair and twining it as they lurched off. Papa settled next to Asuka, watching out the window with her. His black jacket complained as he shifted. It had belonged to his dad a long time ago and still smelled like him too, a bit like coffee musk and dirt. There was a big 01 on the back, and on the shoulder it said _Proud Angel Fighter_. Some of the other passengers nodded to him as they passed.

"You look so much like your grandma," papa said, and Asuka shook her head free of mama's hands, feeling a bit self conscious. He said it often and, much as it embarrassed her sometimes, she never got tired of hearing it. She was ten years old now, but could still hear him saying how proud she should be when she was just a little girl. A boy had made her cry at school, and when papa came to pick her up, she'd been too ashamed to tell him why. She'd asked him if there was something wrong with her name, and he had looked betrayed.

"Why would you think that?"

Asuka had taken her hand away from his, wishing she could wipe that look from his face. They were quiet for a while, and papa slowed his pace so she could keep up. Eventually, she reached for his hand again, and sensed him relax. They went off the road a bit, perking her interest. Finding a budding cactus, papa handed her a plastic bag from his back pocket and she held it open as he started to pluck the prickly pears from their needly thrones. She had tried to do it without gloves, like him, and had ended up with a handful of tiny thorns. At home they would make juice out of them, and Asuka struggled to hide her delight at the prospect, already tasting the bubblegum and watermelon sweetness.

"Your grandpa and grandma saved the world. Did you know that?" he glanced back.

"They did?" she asked, still a bit cross with him. She swayed on her feet.

"Yes, many times."

He dropped a few pears in her bag. "When?"

Papa gave his answer some thought, trying to find it in his search for pears. That boy told her she had a war criminal's name. That's what his daddy said. So she'd scratched his face and called him a liar.

"A long time ago," he finally said. "When they were very young. Beings called Angels came to Earth and your grandparents fought them."

A war with angels? Asuka had heard of that somewhere before. Later, when she was old enough for the third grade, she would learn about what that was – and how easily she had confused it with stories about the Catholics and their new gods.

"How?" was all she could ask.

"With their machines," papa said, the bag growing heavy. "Giant machines as tall as skyscrapers." he cursed as a needle sliced his thumb at the crease, sucking at the blood. Asuka offered to kiss it, since that's what mama always did for her cuts and bruises. She knew it didn't actually make them feel better, but it made him smile again.

Tracking back home, he brought her up on his shoulders, bag of prickly pears in one hand and her right ankle in another.

"What happened?" she asked, diving into his lengthy black hair as she leaned over his head. "How did they win?"

"One day, when you're older, I'll tell you the story. It was an ugly war, and they went through a lot of terrible things."

"What kind of things?"

"Things no one should ever have to go through. But they were strong, your grandma and grandpa. Even when they didn't want to be. So there's nothing wrong with your name." Papa sounded so proud when he said it.

Now six years older, Asuka didn't have many memories of her grandparents. They were feelings and smells more than anything. But papa always told her how grandma would fuss over her. When he used to visit her while Asuka was away with mama, and grandma would say, "Just you? Where is my little Marie?"

He told her how grandpa used to care for his garden and how he had gentle hands not accustomed to fighting, and how she had fallen in love with his roses. Papa told her a lot of stories about them, as many as he could and as often as he could. Some were happy, some were strange and most were sad. But she always listened, because papa said stories were important. "They last forever," he said, "even when memory starts to fade and there is nothing left to remember but the story."

Boots clapped to a stop by their seats, and Asuka took in a man almost as tall as papa, his uniform dark like the marble pillars outside. Where once the wearer might have been able to fill its edges, he appeared too thin for them now. It looked like a Marine's dress blues, but the badge insignia on his cap was a sakura cherry blossom bordered by two ivy branches instead. Between white gloved fingers he had a cigarette, the other hand rubbing the back of his head. "I'm terribly sorry, but could an old man trouble you for a light?"

Mama slid her silken black hair aside and roamed in her purse, while papa tried to hide a frown as she offered a bic lighter. She didn't smoke, not cigarettes at least – and much as they tried to hide it, Asuka knew it was the cause of some argument between them.

The man cupped his hands and lit the bud, returning the lighter and a yellow grin with it, nudging the tip of his cap. Asuka liked the smell of cigarettes, even if the smoke stung her eyes and made her nose itch.

"Why don't you sit?" mama said, nodding to the empty row across from them. "You must be tired."

"Thank you," he said, adjusting his overcoat and collapsing with more weight than Asuka thought possible for his wizened frame. "These old bones only get me so far."

"What's your name?" Asuka asked.

"Saki. What is your name?"

"Asuka!"

"Oh? Here, let me look at you." Saki leaned forward and took a long drag from his cigarette, holding her with critical eyes. He blew the smoke away from her. Then, warming up to the idea, nodded. "Ah... yes, I see," he said, reaching out to poke two fingers by her nose. She giggled. "You have fire in your eyes."

Easing back, he nodded again. "My, yes. You're sure to break many hearts when you grow up, eh?"

"Nuh-uh!" she cried, jumping to her feet, grip tightening around the flowers. "I won't break _any_ hearts!"

His eyes widened and he gasped. "Never?"

" **Never** ever."

Saki had a rasping chuckle. "Well, that's good for you."

Papa touched her arm, with that look that told her to behave, and she sat back down, eying mister Saki as a hand slipped into an overcoat pocket. Every so often he glanced up at her while drawing out coin rolls one by one. Quarters, dimes and nickels. Asuka quirked her head at that, content to keep her questions while he tore the paper, counting each American coin in his palm. He started with the nickels.

She nudged her chin out. "What are those for?"

"For my friends," he said, gathering the coins in one hand, metal jingling pleasantly. "We grew up in Ohio, after the Angel War."

"Were you in a war?" she asked.

Papa hissed. "Asuka..."

Something of a smirk played on Saki's pockmarked face and he sent papa an easing gesture, then set his attention back on her. "Yes, I was," he said, starting to stack the nickels on the shelf of the window. "The First Sino-Balkan War."

Asuka knew that one. It had happened sometime before she was born, and she could tell anyone where it was on a map. Uncle Hiro had fought over there too. They kept a picture of him up in the hallway at home, but she had never gotten to meet him.

"My grandma and grandpa were in a war too," she said, kicking her feet. "We're going to see them today."

Each stack he made went seven high, until he started on the dimes. "Then they are very lucky to have a granddaughter such as you," he said, pausing to take his cigarette away. "If only we could all be so blessed."

"So who are you visiting, mister Saki?"

The tip of the bud had burned away. Saki ashed it over the floor, and took another drag. Still, his smirk was nostalgic. "Too many to name, child. Too many to name."

After the dimes, he started to count the quarters and set them alongside the others, these with a slow sort of reverence. Each one he tipped to his head, closing his eyes as if in prayer, and set them with care. That was when the puzzle pieces fit – and she remembered. She'd never seen the ritual, but her Aunt Yuki had taught her what it meant. A nickel for training together at boot camp. A dime for serving with them. And a quarter – for being there when they died. Sometimes, people even left pennies if they had nothing to offer but thanks.

"I'd have a heart attack trying to visit them all," Saki explained, staring out the window now, wearing a softness that made him look younger. "So I sit on the railcars and watch them go by, letting the memories fill my head."

Asuka thought of what to say, so much that the clicking of the rails and the whine of the accelerators came between them. She liked to think she always knew what to say, but now she could only stare at the coins, counting them over and over. Saki must've been very lonely. The hiss of the compressors broke the spell, and the words were there for her, warmth blossoming in her heart. For a moment, she allowed papa to hold the flowers for her as they came to a stop.

"We have to go now," she said to Saki, who inclined his head. Asuka pushed herself up the armrest next to him and planted a kiss on his cheek. "Thank you for what you did."

He laughed. "For you, anything." Saki reached into his overcoat again. "But I think there are two soldiers more deserving of your thanks than I," he said. She held out her hand and he set two coppers in her palm. Closing her fingers around them, she nodded.

Asuka gathered the flowers up in her arms from papa, one last fleeting glance cast at the window sill. She counted fifty-two nickels, forty dimes and thirty-three quarters.

Out on the seventeenth platform, chilled air lanced over her cheeks, speared down to her hands and over her knees. Even her deep sage green overcoat, papa's present to her last year, didn't keep the cold away. Mama wore little more than a short skirt, long-sleeved shirt and beat up varsity jacket. Both of them wondered how she could stand it. But she'd grown up in the British Isles and Glasgow's winters were much, much colder than this. On trips up there, while trudging through the pure white snow and brushing by old trees, Asuka always caught herself dreaming of papa's hometown in Florida.

As they worked down the steps to ground level, where the markers reached high as a forest, mama placed a hand on her back. "That was nice of you to say, Asuka."

She nodded, trying to read each name as they passed, like she had done the past two years. She knew she wouldn't remember them, but it seemed respectful anyway. This time, she found her thoughts drifting, the names passing in a blur. "It might not mean much to other people – going somewhere and fighting, I mean. But... it meant something to him."

Papa made one his quiet grunts, a pleased sound. "You're right."

The walkways were cleared of snow, excess pushed up between the base of each pillar, just about as tall as Asuka and making her feel, as always, that they were walking through one of the trenches like in her Eastern Front books. She remembered she had been reading one about a German soldier, back at her grandparents house. There wasn't much she could recall about them, and the book hadn't made much sense at her age. Papa had said grandpa and grandma were in a war, but wouldn't tell her which one for a while yet, so she decided to find it on her own. That, and she simply liked to read, even if she didn't understand all the words.

Their house had been a warm place. Arizona was hot most months out of the year, but their living room possessed a firelight glow and smelled of olive oil. Papa held onto grandma's arm, whispering, though Asuka couldn't see their faces past the orange glow coloring the glass of the front door and framing them in black. She was too far to hear what they were saying too, but could see papa's pleading, and could only wonder why grandma just bowed her head, silent.

"Who are you?" a gruff voice asked, but not unkind. Asuka turned to her grandpa, sitting in his big red throne. His hair was a bit gray now. In the pictures they had at home, it was still black. His eyes seemed tired too, but were soft behind his bifocals.

"Asuka – Asuka Marie," she said. She liked to use both names. It was the third time today he had asked her that, even though only an hour ago she'd been sitting in his lap talking about her book, and he had wondered why such a sweet girl was reading about such an awful war.

"Asuka?" grandpa asked. "That's a pretty name."

"I know," she said, lips tight as she kicked her feet. She wished mama would come back from the porch, or that grandma would come sit with her again. They had warned her that grandpa would be this way. It hurt a little each time and she tried not to let him see. They told her there was something wrong with his brain, so he couldn't help it.

She looked up and found grandpa grimacing.

"What's wrong?" Asuka asked, hoping she hadn't done something to make it worse. His eyes were hooked to her, but didn't see her.

He sounded far away. "I... I remembered something, or... someone..." his brow worked, as though he'd been asked a difficult question – or given a riddle. A thought struggled to take shape, but never made its way out. Slowly, his gaze wandered the room, a bit of uncertainty pressing his lips together. She wasn't sure why everything scared him so much.

"Is it happy?"

Grandpa started. "What?"

The corners of her mouth hesitated, but she put on a smirk, a small one. "What you remembered. Is it happy?"

He gave that some thought, then nodded. "I think so," he said, soft enough to snuff out.

"Well, if it makes you happy, shouldn't you smile?" she asked.

He blinked. Then his shoulders fell, and without any strain at all, Grandpa Shinji smiled too.

 **Shinji Soryu**

 **2001 – 2061**

 **Asuka Langley Soryu**

 **2001 – 2065**

The names and dates were etched in silver and, if not for the medals covering both marker's surface, there would've been nothing to distinguish either of them and the hundreds of other names. Some she recognized, like the Chrysanthemum and the Precious Crown, or the much older Rising Sun. Others were unfamiliar, but just as bright and ornate. She even spotted a few rank chevrons here and there – a corporal, a sergeant, even a lieutenant's bar.

Asuka would've liked to meet the visitors and thank them for making the pillars so colorful. For a while, however, she stared high up to their peaks. Down below, her reflection was hidden inside the dark, polished stone. Going down to her knees, she set the fragile little bunches of lilacs in grandma's slot and, shifting her knees, did the same for grandpa's sunflowers.

The ice was pooling through her pants and freezing her joints bit by bit, soaking her skin. But she didn't care, imagining other places and other times, as best she could – trying to invoke her grandmother's reflection in her place. Mama kneeled beside her and rolled up her right sleeve, closing her eyes and pressing two fingers to the veins at her wrist. Asuka watched her slowly trace them along the white scar that started at her middle finger and reached to her elbow, a prayer lost in the wind.

Mama said it was a part of her initiation, when she was only a girl like Asuka, but didn't talk about it much beyond that and the few times she visited the Tree of Glass in Memphis. Her and papa, by his own account, had debated it endlessly – since he wasn't devout in anything and thought it best that way. "But your mother, she's stubborn, and eventually... she made me see things a little differently." he didn't mention the Trinity or threaten her with the coiling serpent, like mama sometimes did when she was misbehaving. He did take them to Katsuragi shrine every so often, just on the horizon. From where they were, figures too far to make faces from ascended the steps. Red torii gates led up to it, the rooftops curling at the edges. A single, bright speck amid the monotony.

"Do you think grandpa and grandma would have liked me?" Asuka asked as papa crouched on her left. Not as a little kid, but as she was now.

His incredulous smile told her he hadn't caught her meaning, and she flushed a little. "They _did_ like you," he said, reaching for a pocket. "Grandpa got to hold you when you were just a baby, and grandma couldn't get enough of you."

Asuka tilted her head a little. She had blurry memories of a woman in a hospital bed, sitting up and looking at her with a tired smile, flowers sagging in a vase on the window sill.

"Here, look."

He showed her a picture on his phone, and she saw what must have been her as a toddler, wide-eyed, but happy all the same while sitting in her grandmother's lap. The woman's hair was much lighter, and she was much older, a gauntness in her neck and her laugh lines more pronounced. But from what Asuka could tell, she had the most wonderful smile in the world.

"I wish I could remember," her voice faded to a mumble and she hugged her overcoat tight around. Sometimes, when they stayed for a while in Obihiro, she didn't like listening to the Suzahara's talk about growing up in Tokyo-3 with her grandparents. What they were like when they were only a little older than her. How much everything had changed. It just wasn't fair that everyone else had so many memories of them, while she had so few. She kept trying to convince papa to let her read grandpa's book – she was ten years old already!

"Someday," he'd say, laying a hand on the book, all too amused with her pouting. Asuka didn't understand. They were already learning about Second Impact and the Angel War in school, and she'd been reading about other wars since she was old enough to read, even if she couldn't recall much of those books. If grandma were still around, she would have let Asuka read it. She might have been young, but she knew when she was being spoiled, and if Asuka had wanted something, there was nothing mama or papa could do to keep grandma from indulging her.

A thought struck her then. "Why do me and grandma have the same name?"

"Because..." he fingered the small, golden cross hanging from his neck, face shadowed by melancholy. "because I didn't ever want to forget."

He hadn't cried at the funeral, but had sat on the couch at home and sobbed into his hands for an hour after. Mama was there with him, shoulders slumped and eyes red. Asuka sat with him and hugged him too, because it hurt so much to see him that way and she just wanted to make him better, even when all he did was grab her in an awkward embrace and try in vain to dry his eyes.

Asuka took his hand. "It's a good name."

A thoughtful noise rumbled from his throat, but he didn't speak and stood. Coming around to his side, mama folded her fingers with his too. As they left, Asuka set a penny each at their markers, then ran to catch up. Papa snared her as she ran to mama and set her on his shoulders. It wasn't often she let him treat her like a little kid anymore, but every now and again entertained him. Certainly not because she, as mama said, enjoyed being a kid too much to act so grown up.

Well, maybe that was a little true.

"You have to make me a promise," papa said, shifting his head. "You have to come here every year and bring them flowers. Even when I'm old and gone one day." he held out his pinky and she hooked it with hers. Lilacs for grandma. Sunflowers for grandpa.

"Promise," she said.

"Don't forget your grandma and grandpa."

"I won't, papa," she said, a memory surfacing as she looked back. She sat at the water's edge along the beach, the wind playing with her matted, frizzled hair. Her grandpa squatted in front of her, shielding her from the blinding light of the sun with his cool shadow. Sea salt stung her nose. Behind him, grandma reached over his shoulder and held out her open hand, offering a ruddy red shell to place atop Asuka's castle. Her papa sat beside her and mama kneeled, the four of them watching as she placed it atop the highest tower.

"I won't forget."

* * *

 ** _Anfang_**


End file.
